A British woman told how she was abducted as a teenager and held imprisoned for 13 years at her abductor’s home. The sadistic paedophile sold her four babies she had from him raping her. An Asian taxi driver kidnapped her when she was just 15 years old and relentlessly beaten her and used her as a sex slave.
The taxi driver befriended with Anna Ruston (not her real name) in Midlands and lured her to his home. He then locked her in a room and brutally raped her almost every night. Anna said her captor branded her his “white s***” and repeatedly raped her before prostituting her out to other men and selling her four babies.
She is now free for 16 years and wrote a book as part of therapy for her experiences, “Secret Slave” which published on Thursday. In the book, she explained how she was imprisoned by the man, named Malik at a taxi rank where she worked.
Rejected by her parents growing up, she was befriended by Malik. In 1987, he invited her to his home which he shared with his brothers, their wives, children and his mother “to meet his family for tea”. He asked her to stay the night.
She said he violently raped and abused her for 13 years and allowing his brothers to visit her and prostituting her out to other men.
She was forced to go to the toilet in a can and is still haunted by the smell of garlic, which reminds her of her kidnapper.
Ms Rouston said, “I can still see that bedroom, the corner where I would rock in pain. Although after a while I stopped feeling pain, I think my body shut down. And I can smell it – the can I used as a toilet, the garlic he reeked of. I got to the point where I didn’t know what life was.”
She tried to escape but became frightened after she was badly beaten for this attempt. Several times, she tried to kill herself.
Ms Rouston was taken to hospital with injuries but was never left alone with doctors or nurses.
When she got pregnant she was thrilled to feel that. She wrote, “When you feel a baby move in your stomach you feel you have someone with you, you are not alone.”
During her pregnancy, Malik stopped beating her but he took her first son away. Also, he took her three more children and gave it to other couples for money.
When the family said they were going to Pakistan, her determination to escape was faded away. She wrote, “Towards the end when they said they were taking me to Pakistan I knew that it was either kill myself or get out because I knew that I wasn’t going to go to a wedding and I knew that they would probably stone me to death or sell me.”
At last, she found her courage. A health visitor came to see her because she weighed just six stone. She slipped a note to the visitor begging for help when the family would be busy with Eid festival.
The health visitor returned another note promising to wait outside and ring the house phone three times. She heard the phone rings and was fortunate to escape.
At last, Ms Rouston (now 44) found her happiness with Jaimie, her childhood love who had been in the Army. He was happy to see her when they met after many years. But it took years for her to tell him the truth, she was in the hospital with anorexia.
They are now happily living together with their four children.
But the monster was roaming free as she is too scared to report her captor to the police.
This is not the first time her story terrified the world. Her story reminds the previous world famous kidnap victims Jaycee Lee Dugard, Natascha Kampusch, Elisabeth Fritzl and Elizabeth Smart.
The independent anti-slavery commissioner, Kevin Hyland said to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that in these cases of modern-day slavery police should not always need a victim’s evidence to take action. “Sometimes there’s ways of collating evidence without a victim.” He added, “That’s why I’ve been saying continuously and in my annual report to Parliament this year, saying this is serious organised crime and policing needs to use the same techniques, the same level of resources, like it does for other serious and organised crime.”
