A sex attacker who boasted to a young woman’s mother on the phone “I’m raping your daughter right now” has been arrested.

The man, together with a friend who helped him with the attack in the district of Dosemealti in the southern Turkish city of Antalya, was initially released on 30th September 2019.

But after the family of the victim, identified only as Cigdem Y., 29, revealed how he had boasted down the phone that he was raping her when she had called her mother to say she thought she was going to die, it caused widespread public outrage, and he has now been arrested on rape charges with a friend accused of assisting him.

Their release caused outrage on social media and thousands of netizens shared posts with the hashtag ‘MuratKTutuklansin’ (‘DetainMuratK’).

A case has now been filed with the Antalya 11th High Criminal Court after the alleged rapist, identified as Murat Kaya, offered to give her a lift to a taxi rank after she left the nightclub where she worked.

Instead, he took her to a furniture workshop where he beat her, forced her to take drugs and then sexually assaulted her for hours before taking her in a car and dumping her in the road.

He returned to the workshop after dumping her beside the road where he cleaned the ground with a hose to wash away any evidence and then deleted the CCTV records 24 hours after that.

At one point during the horrific ordeal, Cigdem had called her mother on the phone and said: “Mum, I’m dying. Take care of my son.”

Murat had then grabbed the phone and told the mother: “I am raping your daughter right now.”

The girl had not been able to reveal where she was, and it was only when she was found beside the road that she was hospitalised in a serious condition.

Cigdem immediately went to the police and filed a complaint, proving the sexual assault with a medical report, but despite that the suspects were originally not kept in custody, and a short while later the young victim tried to kill herself.

The suicide attempt was not successful, but Cigdem is now bed-bound, living in a room her mother has turned into a hospital unit, where she is constantly connected to breathing apparatus and can only respond to questions by slightly moving her toes.

After the attack, CCTV images had been wiped from the furniture workshop camera and that because of that, the police had released the man and his friend, identified by his initials G.K., who was also involved in the incident and who stole TRY 850 (GBP 83) from the victim’s purse after the rape.

Police who later managed to recover some of the CCTV footage from the computer said that it showed the young woman being attacked and thrown to the floor, where the accused tried to remove her clothing. He then tried to be intimate with her, and when she refused he beat her and threw her to the ground again.

The Ministry of Family and Social Policies will also be involved in the case.

The investigation continues.