A man accused of pretending his own death and fleeing from the United States to avoid accusations of sexual assault and fraud was convicted of rape in Utah on Wednesday, Associated Press reported.
A jury from Salt Lake County found Nicholas Alahverdian, who has been identified and accused by the authorities in Utah as Nicholas Rossi, guilty after three days of testimony. The deliberations began on Wednesday.
He will be sentenced in October, said Salt Lake Tribune.
Alahverdian faces a second trial for rape in the nearby Utah County scheduled for September.
In 2022, two years after an online obituary declared that Alahverdian died of no Hodgkin lymphoma, Alahverdian was arrested in Scotland under the name of Arthur Knight.
Speaking with a British accent and appearing in a wheelchair, he denied that he was Alahverdiano and said he was an Irish orphan who had become a businessman.
In his opening statement, the prosecutor of the Salt Lake County case said that Alahverdian admitted his true identity under oath last year. He accused Alahverdian of raping a 24 -year -old woman in 2008 after a romance and commitment whirlwind.
At the trial, the victim testified that Alahverdian quickly became a controller and bad after she bought her rings and lent her money for rent. When she withdrew the ring and told her that her relationship was over, they fought and he finally assaulted her, testified.
Alahverdian’s defense lawyer, Mackenzie Potter, compared the accusations with an “old puzzles of the second -hand store,” saying that “not all the pieces are there.”
The victim’s story had changed over time, Potter said, and cannot be verified.
Alahverdian, who was raised in the Rhode Island youth system and then became an open assistant in the legislature of that state, was accused or convicted in other cases of assault and sex crimes that involved women with whom he was in relations.
In a case in Massachusetts in 2010, a woman with whom she was married at that time told the authorities that she held it, grabbed her neck, hit her in the face and refused to let her leave her house after a discussion about a baby crying.
Alahverdian did not declare a lesser crime of domestic assault and was sentenced to probation.
In Ohio in 2008, a woman Alahverdian met in MySpace accused him of sexually assaulting her while walking class at a local community university. He denied the accusation and was accused of public indecency and sexual imposition, a minor crime that indicates sexual contact against the will of a person.
After a trial, Alahverdian was fined and was ordered to register as a sexual offender.
The second case of Utah, also from 2008, involves a woman who said they had begun to get out after getting to know each other in Myspace. A affidavit in support of an arrest warrant shows that he told the authorities that he broke it after he became increasingly aggressive and asked for money borrowed without paying it.
On September 13 of that year, she said that she went to her house after he said she would pay her, according to the affidavit. Instead, he violated it, according to the document.
The next day, a sex aggression kit was completed, the authorities, but a portfolio of tasks in the tests meant that Alahverdian was not identified as a suspect until a decade later. Alahverdian declared himself innocent in that case.
