A BISHOP Auckland man has been found guilty of rape.

A jury at Teesside Crown Court today unanimously found Saman Osmanzadeh, 31, guilty of raping a Darlington teenager.

The 19-year-old said she woke up naked in bed with no recollection of how she got there.

During the trial Osmanzadeh threw away his right to give evidence after five times refusing to answer a question from his own barrister about his previous convictions.

He also refused to answer questions from the prosecution earlier in the trial.

Yesterday he also refused to allow his defence barrister to make a closing speech.

Prosecuting for the case, Christine Egerton in her closing statement, said: “In this case we know that the defendant refused to be questioned. He wouldn’t answer the questions. We’re going to hear the questions I would have asked him, had he been prepared to answer questions and expose himself to scrutiny.”

Earlier in the trial, jurors heard how the defendant picked up the teenage girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, in Darlington before driving her to Bishop Auckland where he raped her.

CCTV footage showed the young woman leaving a pub in Darlington town centre to get a taxi but it pulled away just seconds before she reached the car after waiting for more than five minutes for his customer.

Moments later she walked across the road and got into Osmanzadeh’s Nissan Micra.

The court heard the defendant then took her to Bishop Auckland where he raped her before driving her back to her friend’s house in Darlington.

Ms Egerton continued: “When he was sitting in his car in the early hours, what was on his mind when he was making searches on the internet of ‘escort slut’.

“When you saw him driving round the block why did he wait at the junction, did he see [the 19-year-old] as she crossed the road, did he watch her as she crossed the road. Did he notice that she appeared not 100 per cent?”

Osmanzadeh denied the allegation saying that it was consensual.

The jury took approximately two hours to come to a guilty verdict.

When Osmanzadeh was brought back into the court he began shouting and Judge Carroll instructed him to be taken out of the court. He was not present for the guilty verdict.

In her evidence, the victim said: “When I came to realise what had happened I started to cry. I was starting to piece it together and wondered how I had got there.

“I didn’t remember anything and that is when it shocked me, because I couldn’t remember.”

Giving evidence during the trial, she accepted she had been drinking and taking drugs on the night and when asked whether she had consensual sex with the accused, she said she was "in no state to consent or not to sex". The teenager said she had no recollection of anything that happened between midnight and 4am when she woke up in the stranger’s bed.

She said: “I asked him to take me home and he then put me in his car with his friend and that’s all that I can remember.”

The officer asked her why she believed she had been raped and she told him that she knew what sex felt like and knew she would never have gone home with her attacker because she had no idea who he was and had never spoken to him before. The court heard the victim had been dropped off at a friend’s house and she realised something was wrong.

He is due to be sentenced on November 10.