A Sri Lankan asylum seeker accused of breaking into a unit in the middle of the night and indecently assaulting a woman as she slept has been found not guilty by an Australian court.
Tamil asylum seeker Daxchan Selvarajah, 24, was this morning acquitted by the Sydney District Court jury who retired to consider its verdict earlier this week.
Selvarajah, from Sri Lanka, had pleaded not guilty to charges of aggravated break and enter with indecent assault and attempted break and enter with intent to commit indecent assault on February 21, 2013.
Selvarajah has admitted being in the bedroom but always denied indecently assaulting the girl.
He was granted bail on the charge but has spent the past three years in immigration detention, as his temporary Visa was cancelled after his arrest.
Giving evidence at the week long trial, he told the jury he was wandering around a Macquarie University accommodation village at 3am looking for another male refugee, whose name and unit number he did not know, hoping to buy cigarettes from him.
The trial had previously heard refugees were living in temporary accommodation on the university grounds when a second-year student reported being woken in the night by the touch of a “cold hand” on her inner thigh and that she was then rubbed on her genitalia.
He told the court through a Tamil interpreter that he put his hand on the bed cover and shook the leg of the sleeping form.
Selvarajah added that when the person got up he realised it was a woman.
“I didn’t know what to do at the time, I was shocked and I was very fearful,” he said.
Selvarajah said he told her in broken English “this is Dax, I thought this is my friend home, I got wrong home,” then ran away.
Source: The Daily Telegraph
-Agencies
