By FRANCINE WOLFISZ, NEWS REPORTER

Published: 11:34 BST, 19 September 2026 | Updated: 11:40 BST, 19 September 2026

An illegal migrant Deliveroo rider who dragged a woman off the street ‘like a ragdoll’ before raping her has been jailed for 21 years.

Following the vicious assault, which left his victim feeling ‘destroyed’, Salem Rekoub, 28, was caught on CCTV wearing his turquoise uniform and smirking as he followed her ambulance to hospital, because he wanted to ‘get to the woman again’.

Rekoub, who was dubbed a public danger by the judge, arrived in Britain on a tourist visa in 2023. He did not have the right to work in the UK. 

Isleworth Crown Court heard that he took advantage of the woman, who is in her 40s, after seeing her ‘semi-conscious’ at a bus stop.

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Rekoub then dragged her down a side road in Chelsea, West London, before finding a gap between cars where he attacked her in July 2024. 

During the 17-minute assault, the woman drifted in and out of consciousness while he repeatedly told her: ‘You need to be quiet’.

His victim was left with 33 bruises across her body.

Rekoub then called 999 and told operators a ‘pack of lies’, said prosecutors, as he tried to deceive them over what had happened.

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Deliveroo rider Salem Rekoub, 28, who had no right to work in the UK, has been jailed for 21 years for raping a woman

Rekoub was caught on CCTV walking along the corridors of Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in a bid to ‘get to the woman again’ after being taken there by ambulance following her ordeal

He told a paramedic the woman had ‘too much to drink’, before telling police, under an assumed name, that he was simply a concerned passerby.

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Rekoub then followed his victim’s ambulance to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where cameras recorded him walking through corridors and looking into triage rooms in an attempt to find her. 

When one hospital worker asked him what he was doing, he said: ‘I’m here to find someone.’

As his victim recovered, she was able to tell paramedics what happened and Rekoub was arrested nine days later. 

The court heard the woman, who must remain anonymous for legal reasons, had been left in ‘an almost catatonic state’ since the attack, and has suffered seizures. She has also spent time in a mental health treatment centre.

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In a victim impact statement read to the court, she said: ‘This has destroyed my life and I am not the same person.

‘It has killed me and made me feel worthless. I tried to take my own life because I felt like I could not cope.

‘I have been left in a constant state of fear. I couldn’t escape because he told me to be quiet and had his hands around my throat.

‘I have been left completely numb and disassociated. I have begun to have seizures and my speech has become slurred.’

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The court heard how the woman had been out with friends and had taken a bus home but got off early because she was feeling unwell. She passed out at the bus stop, where she was then found by Rekoub.

Following a trial by jury, Rekoub was found guilty of three counts of rape, and two counts of assaulting a female by penetration.

His defence told the court he had been a promising footballer who was almost selected for the Algerian team, but a knee injury had cut short his career.

A Deliveroo spokesman said: ‘We are appalled by these truly horrific crimes and our thoughts are with the victims and their families.

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‘This individual was not a verified rider on our platform, but a criminal who abused our systems to gain access illegally.

‘We have since significantly strengthened the measures to control who can access our platform – and continue to invest to combat any abuse.’

The restaurant has won awards for its burgers

A new restaurant has been given the go-ahead to open on a city centre street. The Beefy Boys Holdings has been told they can change the use of a former bar on Bene’t Street in Cambridge into a new restaurant.

The restaurant chain sought permission from Cambridge City Council in June and it has now been approved. The site, on 15 Bene’t Street, forms part of the Grade II listed Barclay’s Bank. It was last used by Brewdog, but has been vacant since March 2026.

The Beefy Boys opened its first restaurant in Hereford in 2015, before opening a second site in Shrewsbury in 2021 and a third site in Cheltenham in 2023. It also has sites in other locations including Oxford and Nottingham.

Now, Cambridge locals could get a taste of its award-winning burgers. The burger chain has won both Signature Burger and Burger Chef of the Year at The National Burger Awards.

The applicants said the new restaurant will “serve as a meeting place for local people and visitors” and will provide a “suitable alternative facility to the existing use”.

Planning documents state it would provide a “high quality restaurant”, enhance the “vitality and viability of this part of Cambridge City Centre ” and help to “secure the future up keep of the Grade II Listed building”.

The new restaurant would be situated close to a range of existing pubs and restaurants including The Eagle, The Bath House and Pint Shop.

The building’s existing use permits opening hours between 11am and midnight between Sunday and Thursday and between 11am and 12.30am on Fridays and Saturdays. The Beefy Boys Holdings Ltd said these hours are “considered suitable for the proposed use”, but there is considered to be no concerns if earlier hours from 8am were permitted to allow “flexibility for a future use”, they said.

Alongside a change of use request, the applicant sought permission for Listed Building Consent for works to the building including internal changes and new signage.

Many people will learn CPR using a flat-chested manikin. A 2024 study of 20 models of CPR manikins sold worldwide found that three quarters were described as male or had no sex specified. Of the 20, only one offered a breast overlay.

The manikins reflect a wider tendency in medical teaching and research to treat the male body as standard. The terms “male and female” and “men and women” in this article reflect the sources, which often fail to distinguish sex from gender or say whether gender-diverse people were included.

The lack of female representation can have consequences. In a US study of 19,331 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests, 39% of women who collapsed in public received bystander CPR, compared with 45% of men.

For CPR, even a short delay can affect survival. Another US study found that people who received bystander CPR four to five minutes after a witnessed cardiac arrest had 27% lower odds of surviving to hospital discharge than those who received it within one minute. In England, fewer than one in 12 patients for whom ambulance services attempted resuscitation survived 30 days, according to figures reported in 2024.

If bystanders hesitate to perform CPR on women because of the presence of breasts, training on more representative manikins could help. Historical gaps in representation now have another consequence. Healthcare increasingly uses artificial intelligence trained on medical records and research data produced when male bodies were often treated as the norm.

When old data trains new systems

Healthcare AI learns associations from health data. But medical records reflect clinical decisions as well as biology. If women and men with similar symptoms have historically been assessed differently, an algorithm may learn that pattern without knowing why it exists.

For example, an experimental study of medical students and residents found that when coronary heart disease symptoms were presented alongside psychological stress, women received fewer coronary heart disease diagnoses and cardiology referrals than men, and their symptoms were more likely to be interpreted as psychogenic. An AI system trained on records shaped by such decisions could treat that pattern as though it reflected disease itself.

Reviews of AI in medicine warn that unbalanced datasets can produce uneven performance. It can also be difficult to assess performance: a 2024 review of 692 AI-enabled medical devices approved by the US Food and Drug Administration found that demographic information and details of performance studies were often missing from public documents.

Understanding that risk requires looking at how the medical evidence AI may draw on was created.

How men became the medical default

Females are consistently underrepresented in medical studies. Hormonal changes across the menstrual cycle have historically been viewed as a source of unwanted variation. After the thalidomide tragedy of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the US Food and Drug Administration in 1977 recommended excluding women who could become pregnant from early drug trials. The policy was reversed in 1993 amid concern that it was limiting knowledge about how medicines affected women.

Women of childbearing potential were routinely excluded from industry-sponsored trials. Male animals have also been favoured in laboratory research, despite evidence that females are no more biologically variable, and many studies fail to report the sex of cells used in experiments.

These gaps can affect treatment. Women clear the sleeping drug zolpidem more slowly than men, and in 2013 regulators recommended halving the starting dose for women. A 2020 analysis found that women experienced adverse drug reactions nearly twice as often as men, with differences in how drugs move through the body explaining many of them.

Representation has improved. The 2016 Sex and Gender Equity in Research (SAGER) guidelines encourage researchers to consider and report sex and gender. But equal participation does not guarantee equal understanding. A 2026 review of 574 papers found that 61% included both sexes, yet only 44% of those analysed results by sex.

Biological sex and gender can both affect health, and separating their effects is difficult. Sex-related biology may influence drug metabolism, while gendered experiences may affect access to healthcare and how symptoms are interpreted. Yet many health databases collapse both into one binary category, limiting what researchers can conclude.

Biology or bias?

Heart-attack symptoms show why precision is needed. An analysis of more than one million people with acute coronary syndromes found that 74% of women and 79% of men experienced chest pain, but women had higher odds of reporting other symptoms including neck or jaw pain, fatigue and shortness of breath.

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Women are at a higher risk of dying from heart disease − in part because doctors don’t take major sex and gender differences into account

Stroke care presents a similar problem. An Australian study of more than 202,000 people admitted with stroke found that among those under 70 arriving by ambulance, women were less likely than men to be assessed as having a stroke by paramedics and less likely to be managed under the pre-hospital stroke protocol.

Finding a difference is only the starting point. A study of 6.9 million people in Denmark found that women were older at their first hospital diagnosis for most conditions examined. That does not necessarily mean doctors took longer to diagnose them: disease onset and use of healthcare may also vary.

Medical research is becoming more representative, but much of today’s evidence was collected when male bodies were more often treated as standard. Careful design could help AI identify patterns that older research missed. As tomorrow’s healthcare is built from yesterday’s records, researchers must ask whether an apparent difference reflects biology or the way patients encountered healthcare. Otherwise old assumptions could become embedded in new technology.

A rare catch-and-kill order has been issued for a great white shark off the coast of Western Australia, after a man was killed while on a morning swim at a popular beach on Friday. His body has still not been found.

Authorities have said that beaches along the state’s coast, including in the capital Perth, will remain closed until at least Sunday as the search for the shark continues.

It is the second shark attack in Western Australia (WA) this week, and the third fatal attack in the state this year.

The incident, at Sorrento Beach in Perth’s north, has reignited debate about how to keep beachgoers safe in Australia.

The swimmer has been identified as 63-year-old Greg O’Neill, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has reported.

“Greg loved the ocean and was known as a passionate swimmer, sports lover, dedicated worker and an all-round generous, witty guy,” his family said in a statement to the broadcaster.

Witness Jacqui Rapaic told the ABC that two men were swimming, but only one made it back to shore, and that she could see “a pool of blood” in the water.

Another witness told WAtoday that she saw the man being “mauled” as the shark “tossed him around like a fish”.

Members of the public reported seeing a 2.5m-long (8ft 2in) shark at around the same time.

Authorities in Perth’s Joondalup area, where Sorrento is located, said all beaches were closed “as a precautionary measure” and would remain so until at least midday on Sunday.

Pictures on Saturday showed the coastline being patrolled by a police boat and helicopter.

The mum-of-three was last seen in Southampton in December 2019

A close friend of a mother-of-three whose remains were found nearly seven years after she disappeared said “nothing could prepare” her for the tragic news.

Rachel Roussel, from Southampton, said the discovery of the remains of Joanne Sheen – affectionately known as “Little Jo” – was “absolutely devastating”.

The Metropolitan Police were called on the evening of August 12 after bones, thought to belong to a woman aged between 25 and 45, were found at shrubland known as The Pits near Padstow Walk in Feltham after the area was affected by a blaze. Detectives had launched a murder probe, but Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary have taken over the investigation after the remains were identified as those of Ms Sheen.

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A 56-year-old man from Southampton was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder on Thursday (17 September).

Of the police update, Ms Roussel told the Press Association (PA): “It’s something that everybody’s heavily anticipated, and you kind of get yourself ready and prepare yourself for it. But nothing could prepare you for that, nothing at all.”

The 47-year-old said the years of uncertainty had been particularly difficult for Ms Sheen’s three daughters, two of whom she said have since become mothers themselves.

“Her daughters are mums themselves now, so they’ve had their babies, and their mum wasn’t there for that,” she said. “To have to go through something like this and to have to be going through it for so long, seven years, is just unfathomable.”

Ms Roussel, who met Ms Sheen in 2003, has launched a fundraiser on GoFundMe to help give her friend “a send-off that she so rightly deserves”.

“Now we can focus on helping the girls, bringing her home, and set about laying her to rest finally, which is what they’ve wanted to do,” she said. The two became close while raising their children in Townhill Park in the Hampshire city, with Ms Roussel describing her friend as a “devoted mum” with a “wicked sense of humour”.

“She was just lovely, she’d do anything for you, if you needed to nip to the shop, she’d stay and watch the children,” she told PA. “If you needed to borrow some money, and all she had was £5 in her pocket until the next income support payment dropped, she’d lend it to you.

“She was just lovely, and a devoted mum, a completely devoted mum, every ounce of her energy went into those girls, it was amazing.”

Ms Roussel continued: “Jo was just so much fun to be around, she had a personality that was a bit crazy, but you loved her for it. She had a wicked sense of humour, a fantastic laugh that I’ll never forget, she could make you belly laugh until your belly hurt.”

Ms Roussel recalled them celebrating birthdays, Halloween and New Year’s Eve together. Explaining why she set up the fundraiser, Ms Roussel said she had found herself asking: “What can I do?”

“She was my friend and I loved her very much and I wanted to do something to help the girls,” she said. Ms Roussel said she wanted Ms Sheen to be remembered above all as a mother and friend.

Ms Roussel added: “She was just an amazing human being who’d light up a room, I know that’s a very cliche thing to say about people but she really was. She was a big, big personality, an amazing friend, and she will be very sadly missed, very greatly missed by lots of people.”

The 44-year-old had not been seen since travelling from Fareham towards her home city of Southampton on December 5, 2019.

A Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary spokesperson said more than 4,000 lines of inquiry have been raised, more than 300 statements taken, and detailed searches carried out at more than 10 addresses and on numerous vessels.

Detective Chief Inspector Toby Elcock said the identification of Ms Sheen’s remains is a “significant development” in a “long and complex investigation”. Crimestoppers has reinstated a £20,000 reward for information.

A Metropolitan Police spokesman confirmed that the remains were found by a member of the public after the nearby land was affected by a recent wildfire. The site is close to Bedfont Lakes Country Park.

Shrubbery appeared to have been burned at a woodland area close to where the police crime scene was in place last month and a large patch of the ground was charred.

An incident log on The London Fire Brigade’s website showed that four fire engines and about 25 firefighters had tackled a grass fire in the area on August 5. About two hectares of shrubland were damaged in the blaze.

At issue is Earl Spencer’s account of a conversation with the then Prince Charles after the death of Diana, with the prince accused of telling Earl Spencer: “We’ll forget her soon enough.”

He is accused of sounding “giddily elated” and like a “lottery winner” after the news of her death.

Buckingham Palace hit back with a response, which although dressed in courtier-like politeness, was essentially saying the conversation had never happened like that.

The King was said to be “mindful that the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory in ways that others do not recognise”.

Anyone who has lost someone knows how feelings can run high, people can hear different things about the same conversations – and families can fall out, or come together, in the wake of a death.

Psychotherapist Nick Hatter says he doesn’t have a view on which version of events is correct, but he says that during traumatic events memories can be “distorted”. A phone call doesn’t have any of the visual clues or body language to give a fuller picture, he adds.

Hatter says there can be very different and unpredictable responses to grief, including a condition known as “bereavement mania” where someone can seem inappropriately hyper or even euphoric after the loss of a loved one.

The first opinion poll on who to believe has been published by YouGov – and it suggests a very split view, with 31% believing Earl Spencer’s allegations, 36% suspecting it’s not true and 33% saying they don’t know.

Low thinks the book is unlikely to change many opinions, as “people have settled into their camps about how they regard Charles, how they look back on the Diana years”.

There could also be a feeling that it’s “tawdry” to rake up these claims so many years later, he says.

That’s echoed by historian and author Sir Anthony Seldon who says Earl Spencer showed great courage at the time of Diana’s funeral, but says his memoir is a “sad and unnecessary publication”.

Royal commentator Richard Palmer says the book threatens to take the royals back to the difficult days of 1997.

“This book and the run-up to next year’s 30th anniversary of Diana’s death threaten to undermine the Royal Household’s three decades of work to rehabilitate Charles and Camilla’s image,” he says.

Veteran broadcaster David Dimbleby, who led the BBC’s coverage of Diana’s funeral, said it seemed “odd” Earl Spencer would release the book now.

“Why 30 years later for god sake you should do it, well again you have to ask him,” he said, adding he wished the appetite for the “cycle of gossip” would decline and instead focus would shift to what kind of monarchy the country needs.

Cardiff City return to Championship action this lunchtime as they welcome boyhood Bluebirds fan Nathan Jones and his Charlton Athletic side to Cardiff City Stadium.

The Bluebirds are still searching for their first league win of the season, having drawn four and lost three of their opening seven games under Brian Barry-Murphy. Charlton, meanwhile, are also looking to end a four-game winless run after making a strong start to the campaign.

Kick-off is at 12.30pm, with the game being shown live on Sky Sports+.

We’ll have all the build-up, team news, action and reaction from Cardiff City Stadium right here.

Scroll down for live updates…