A DJ who persuaded a 19-year-old English language student to go to his apartment where he raped her, ignoring her lack of consent, was condemned to a six-year effective jail term. 

The rape took place on a Saturday night in October 2021 when Henry Alonso Cano Rojas, a then-32-year-old Columbian national working as a DJ at a Paceville club, asked the victim to go with him at around 3am. He did not say where he was going.

The teen had spent the evening dancing and drinking with her friends at the club where they went every day during their stay in Malta. 

She had approached the DJ, asking him to play some songs and danced with her friend close to the DJ stand. 

At closing time, the teens lingered inside for a while, waiting for the crowd of clubbers to exit the premises. 

Then, as the young woman and her friends stepped outside, the DJ grabbed her hand and told her to go with him. 

“I don’t want to go with you. I have to stay with my friends. I cannot come,” the victim complained. 

But the accused insisted.

He momentarily let her go when she signalled to a female friend in Dutch that she needed help. 

Her friend intervened and manoeuvred the victim away from the man whose attitude “annoyed” the subject of his attention. However, since her friends were around, she felt safe.

As soon as her friend left her side to buy a pizza, the man grabbed her hand and pulled her to an apartment block nearby. 

He asked her to help carry his bag of musical equipment upstairs and she accepted, never suspecting what she had let herself in for. She later rued that "decision”.

He told her to place his bag inside the bedroom and though reluctant, she stepped inside.

That was when he shut the door and told her to have a look at the view from his bedroom balcony. 

“Ok, nice, but I really need to leave right now,” the victim said. 

As she turned to leave, he began to kiss her and pushed her onto the bed. 

All her efforts to stop his unwelcome advances were futile. 

Gripped by panic, she “just froze”.

When recounting her ordeal she explained that “the only thing [she] could do was looking up to the ceiling like a lifeless body”.

She just did not know “what to do anymore”. She managed to break free and stop the sexual act abruptly when the phone in her bag, lying on her chest, rang. 

It was one of her friends calling to check on her. 

The only thing she could say when she caught up with her friends outside the accused’s apartment block was “rape” in Dutch. 

The next day the accused texted her, saying he was “sorry about last night”.

He said he was “really drunk” and did not “remember anything”.

She eventually filed a police report after confiding in her parents. Her father immediately caught a flight to Malta and went with her to the police. 

The DJ was charged with rape and holding the alleged victim against her will. 

He pleaded not guilty and opted to testify in the proceedings.

The man said he had met the victim six or seven times over a span of three weeks.

He had played her songs and they had danced together. 

Her attitude made him feel that there was “something special between them” and he insisted that the sex was consensual. 

When delivering judgment, the court, presided over by magistrate Rachel Montebello, observed that two conflicting versions of events did not necessarily mean that the accused was to be acquitted.

In this case, after delving into the testimonies and all other evidence put forward, the court concluded that the victim’s version was more credible. 

There were certain inconsistencies in the accused’s version.

CCTV shows DJ holding her hand , leading her to apartment

DNA evidence supported the victim’s version when saying that the sudden ringing of her phone had forced the accused to stop abruptly and get off her. 

CCTV footage also showed him holding her hand as he led her to his apartment and friends’ testimonies corroborated the victim’s version. 

There was nothing strange about the fact that the victim went back to the club after the incident, the court said. 

She had frequented the place with her circle of friends while visiting the island as a language student.

When all was considered, there was no room for equivocation that the victim was not consenting to any intimacy, let alone to sex, and the accused could not have failed to understand that. 

The court also observed that if a party withdrew consent at any stage, even midway through the sexual act, making this clear to the other party and the latter persisted, then he was still guilty of rape.

When all was considered, the court pronounced a conviction, condemning the accused to a six-year effective jail term and ordering his name to be included in the sex offenders’ register once judgment was final.