An asylum seeker from Jordan has denied repeatedly raping a 16-year-old girl he allegedly lured to a car park in Manchester city centre after they met minutes earlier when she asked him for a cigarette. Mourad Iyad Marei Salloum, 20, is on trial at Manchester Crown Court facing three counts of rape and one of sexual assault, and told the court through an interpreter that the encounter was consensual, insisting he never raped her.

Salloum claims the girl, who he said told him she was almost 19, hugged and kissed him before asking to go home with him, which he and a friend refused. The prosecution alleges CCTV shows the teenager following Salloum and another man to a car park, where she was raped multiple times until the attack was interrupted by his friend. Jurors heard DNA found on the girl's neck and jogging bottoms is "one billion times" more likely to belong to Salloum than an unknown man, a claim he disputes, along with his identification in the CCTV footage. The court also heard he has a previous conviction for sexually assaulting a woman in Liverpool, for which he was jailed for 16 weeks.