A man has been jailed for eight years by at the Central Criminal Court for raping a Dublin woman.
Astrit Berisha (38) is an Albanian refugee originally from a rural town in Kosovo, with an address at Summerhill Parade, Dublin 1.
He had been convicted by a jury on February 11th last of four counts of rape, one count of aggravated sexual assault and one of sexual assaulting a woman on August 28th and 29th, 2000.
Mr Justice O'Neill said he was not giving much weight to the fact that Berisha might lose his asylum status because of the imprisonment.
"Conditions in your native country have improved since," he added.
Berisha arrived in Ireland as an asylum-seeker in 1999 and was granted refuge in 2000.
He was found not guilty of falsely imprisoning the woman, who had just started a relationship with his friend. Mr Justice O'Neill described Berisha's offences as "most heinous crimes" calculated to cause great fear in his victim.
He said he was taking into account as a mitigating factor the difficulty Berisha would have in prison as a foreigner without a ready grasp of English.
The 27-year-old victim told the court that one of the worst shocks for her had come after the rape when she discovered Berisha suffered from hepatitis B.
"It was like being kicked in the mouth a second time. I was convinced I had the disease. It was very stressful ... results of the blood test was constantly on my mind and my work suffered. I would often ring hospitals to talk to them about the effects of heptatitis B."
She said she suffered from recurrent nightmares about the rape and experienced powerful flashbacks that came "anywhere, anytime".
She would wake up from nightmares convinced that her attacker was outside her window or her door.
She also told Justice O'Neill that she was still receiving counselling and, until the end of the trial, had relied heavily on sleeping pills to get a night's sleep.
Her parents and her family had also suffered devastating effects because of the rape and she herself had become more introverted and less trusting of people as a consequence.
"The rape haunts me every day, it's in my mind, in my thoughts, constantly."
The court heard during the seven-day trial in February that Berisha and his friend had pretended to be Italians - Berisha giving his name as "Georgio" and the second man as "Alberto" - when they met the woman in a nightclub.