Well done to an Garda Síochána who have caught “one of Europe’s most wanted rapists” who was on the run after being convicted of a horrendous gang rape of a teenage girl and was living in Kildare.
The Irish Sun reported that “evil sex attacker Dmitri Ceban, 31, has been on the run since 2021 after he failed to turn up at Isleworth Crown Court in the UK on May 12, 2021, to be sentenced”.
Ceban, along with three others, subjected their victim to a “prolonged and repeated” attack during the brutal assault.
The four gang-rapists, Dmitri Ceban, Andrei Rotaru, Alexandru Cimbir, and Octavian Lupu were handed prison sentences totally 71 years in 2021 for the brutal rape of the teenager in Ealing in the UK in 2017.
Ealing News reported that Lupu, 31, was seen on CCTV approaching several women in a nightclub before dancing with the victim and buying her drinks.
The court heard that the teenager had planned to get a taxi home, but when she found her mobile wasn’t working she left the club with Lupu who had offered to help her in organising a taxi home.
Instead, she was then “put in the back of a car and was driven to an address in Northolt where she was repeatedly raped by all four men, in an attack that lasted approximately 90 minutes”.
It’s a dreadful reality that the horrific details of cases like this have lost some of the power to shock us in the way that their reading did for the first time. They seem to have become increasingly commonplace, and its a horrendous reflection on the supposedly progressive society we live in.
These are predatory men: prowling the nightclub seeking a victim, buying a teenage girl drinks with evil intent, luring the girl into their car with the full intent of raping her. In my view, they are monsters, and there are too many of them walking amongst us.
The young woman managed to get to a hospital where police were contacted and an investigation began. CCTV from inside the nightclub and the venue’s ID entry system was used to identify the four men who were then arrested.
As is typical, they all denied the allegations, but they were all found guilty and handed lengthy sentences by the Crown Court in Isleworth.
Detective Constable Angie Meadows, who worked on the investigation, told the local paper that the assault was one of the worst she had ever dealt with – and that the men who carried out the monstrous attack showed no remorse.
“The victim was on a night out with her friends when she was subjected to a horrific ordeal by these men who have expressed no remorse for their actions throughout the course of the investigation,” she said. “I hope that the conclusion of the case gives the victim some closure that she can begin moving forward with her life. She has shown great courage and bravery in standing up to her attackers and supporting the investigation.”
Ceban wasn’t in court, however, to receive his sentence of 16 years imprisonment: he had absconded. For the next three years it is unclear where he was, but it seems that he spent a most of this year living in Kildare.
The Irish Sun says that when he failed to turn up in court, “he was immediately placed on Interpol’s most wanted list as he moved between different European countries” but that “investigators believe he moved to Ireland earlier this year and settled in Co Kildare”.
But his secret life was uncovered this week when he was caught by Gardai. And he was only nabbed after he was stopped for speeding on the M1 motorway by officers from Dundalk Roads Policing Unit.
When stopped, he appeared nervous as Gardai checked his identity. They quickly established his links to the gang rape and also that he was wanted by Interpol.
He is being held in Garda custody while the UK authorities seek his extradition to complete his prison sentence in that country.
Almost incredibly, the Irish Sun added that Ceban “was still using his real name and still managed to get a job in a factory”. That’s a frankly terrifying revelation.
Ceban’s movements around Europe were no doubt facilitated by the ease by which any of us can move around the continent, a development on European integration that most of us welcomed and continue to enjoy but which is not without its dark side.
That ease of movement no doubt aids predatory people who are able to move on and find other victims – and in Ceban’s case, he’s been on the loose for seven years since he and his disgusting gang brutally raped that girl.
That’s a discomforting thought: that in the shifting, rapidly changing, demographics being experienced in Ireland there are certainly people who would harm us and harm our loved us, including those who plan and seek out opportunities to act out their depraved fantasies. We need to be better at tracking and identifying such people.
Most people who come here are obviously law-abiding and decent, but surely a system that allows free movement needs to be more vigilant in spotting predators at entry points? It makes my skin crawl to think of my young nieces and their friends who live in Kildare being observed by something with a track record as evil as Dmitri Ceban.
Nor am I comforted by the state’s record in this area, such as the case of the appalling Chico Makamda, originally from the Congo who racked up 19 convictions in this jurisdiction including but not confined to sexual assault, false imprisonment, exposing himself to teenage girls, masturbating in public, robbery and more, but was still roaming around Dublin months after being freed because he was given a reduced sentence on the condition that he self-deport.
Well done to the Gardaí who apprehended Dmitri Ceban and who now have him custody. But the system that allowed him to enter the country and get a job and live and work amongst us needs to be re-examined. The safety of women and girls need to become a priority.