ABERDEEN MAN JAILED FOR VIOLENT RAPE AND HAIR-SHAVING ATTACK
A MASKED raider who raped a pregnant woman at gunpoint was yesterday jailed for 12 years.The High Court in Aberdeen was told that the assault took place after Peter Syme, 35, had tied up the woman's husband in an outhouse and shaved off her hair.
Advocate-depute Mr Hugh Matthews said that the husband had answered a knock at the door of their Kincardine croft just after 7pm on February 23 and was confronted by a man wearing a balaclava and wielding a sawn-off shotgun.
Syme, described in a psychiatrist's report as ''highly dangerous'', ordered him into the house and the husband recognised the man's voice.
He ordered the couple to lie down and tied their hands then gagged the husband with newspaper and tightened a tie round his head to keep it in.
Syme then locked the husband in a tack shed.
The masked man, still holding the gun, took the woman to a bedroom and ordered her to strip.
He took scissors and an electric razor from his pockets and, after cutting off her hair and shaving her head, raped her.
By this time the husband had escaped and gone to a neighbour's house to alert police.
Syme fled in the couple's car which was later found abandoned.
Armed police surrounded Syme's home at 2am and he surrendered.
Mr Matthews said that Syme later told police where they could find the gun.
"I spoke to the complainer this morning and, thankfully, there is no lasting damage to her," Mr Matthews said.
Mr Jack Davidson, defending, said Syme, single and unemployed, lived with his widowed mother.
He was a "shy, loner-type of person" who had been drastically affected by the death of his father in front of his eyes when he was 15.
"Perhaps significantly on the day before these offences happened Mr Syme's widowed mother had been taken into hospital for an operation," Mr Davidson said.
Sentencing Syme to 10 years for the rape and assaults and two years consecutively for a firearms offence, Lord Cowie said: "You have subjected a young woman to the most appalling treatment."
