Martino Biuso, 46, allegedly lured the 21-year-old undergraduate into his car by posing as a taxi driver in Palermo, Sicily
Italian police captured a suspect accused of raping a British student by using a discarded cigarette butt to secure vital DNA evidence.
Martino Biuso, 46, allegedly lured the 21-year-old undergraduate into his car by posing as a taxi driver in Palermo, Sicily, and drove her to a remote spot where he attacked her.
The breakthrough in the eight-month undercover police operation came when a quick-thinking detective who was monitoring his movements spotted him throw the cigarette from a window and managed to salvage it.
It was then used as a potential match to DNA obtained from the distraught student. Biuso was charged with rape, kidnap and aggravated robbery and will be tried later this year. If found guilty he faces up to 28 years in jail.
Speaking about the ordeal for the first time last night the woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, told The Mail on Sunday: ‘When I was told someone had been arrested I was overwhelmed. It is extremely good news.’
The woman, from South-West London, had been living with a fellow student while studying Italian and working as a teaching assistant at a secondary school during a year in the Sicilian capital.
Her two cousins had flown from the UK to visit for a long weekend last May and the four had enjoyed a night out eating pizza on a balmy evening. She said: ‘We were walking back to the apartment and I was not really concentrating because I had been looking at my phone.
‘I got separated and started walking back to them when a man pulled up in a car in the taxi lane. He told me he was a taxi driver so I got in and gave him my address.
‘We even stopped to get out cash for the journey but then I realised he was not driving in the right direction. I rang my cousin to tell her what was going on and she told me to stay on the phone.
‘He drove out on to the motorway and I started really stressing at this point. I knew we weren’t going back to my address and I started fearing for my life. He then drove off the motorway and parked up underneath, by a landfill site. He realised I was still on the phone and climbed into the back seat, hung up the phone and threw it somewhere.’
To her cousin’s horror, the line went dead and she frantically phoned the police. The student added: ‘He raped me on the back seat and afterwards he got me out of the car. He left me in pitch black in the middle of nowhere.’
A security guard found her at around 4.30am cowering under a bridge. Police took DNA samples and began an exhaustive search to find the man responsible.
They obtained CCTV showing the man at the cash machine where they had stopped and Palermo police officers were issued with photos of the car. For months any vehicle matching its description was stopped and the driver interrogated.
In January, eight months later, they spotted a man matching the description in an identical car and followed him to his parents’ house. He was seen smoking a cigarette from a window and flicked the butt outside where officers salvaged it.
Biuso was arrested on February 20 and claimed he did have sex with her but that it was consensual.
Rosaria Maida, vice commissioner of Palermo’s sex offences division, said: ‘This was a horrendous attack. She was very popular at the school where she taught and her students were very fond of her. We are very pleased to be in a position to have charged the suspect.’