A woman “thought she was going to die” when a man raped her, locked her in a cupboard and strangled her, a court has heard.

Mark Martin, aged 27, is on trial accused of the rape, false imprisonment and assault of a woman in Milton Keynes between October 27, 2021 and October 29, 2021.

At a trial that opened in Aylesbury Crown Court on Tuesday, prosecutor Liam Gregory showed the jury a police interview with the woman the day after the alleged incident. The woman cannot be named for legal reasons.

In the interview, she described how Martin had been in her flat and attempted to touch her sexually while she was asleep. When she asked him to leave, she told the officers that he “went mad”, shouting at her, throwing her around the room, and eventually locking her in a walk-in wardrobe.

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She said: “I grabbed him to say stop and that’s when it started happening, he was throwing me onto the bed, shouting nasty things in my face.

“I was trying to get away from him and it was making him really angry.”

The court heard that builders were working outside the woman’s flat at the time and had scaffolding outside of the windows. The court heard that Martin blocked off the windows with bed sheets and hid her in a cupboard to stop her from calling for help and attempted to tie her up with an extension lead.

She said: “He knew I would scream for help, so he shut all the windows and locked all the doors.

“He dragged me by the hair from the bedroom to the second bedroom to the walk-in wardrobe and shut the door behind me. There’s no light in there so I couldn’t see anything.

“I just felt like he was trying to kill me. He kept coming to strangle me all the time, putting his fingers over my mouth.

“I was just lying on the floor silently and he would come up to me and kick me in the ribs.”

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In his opening speech, Mr Gregory told the jury that the attack was sexual as well as physical, and that he raped her during the ordeal.

Mr Gregory said: “He made her get on the bed, she didn’t have the energy to stop him so just let him have sex with her.

“She cried all the time. He didn’t stop. She said he enjoyed the fact she was crying and that she just wanted to die.”

Mark Martin, of Biscot Road, Luton, is charged with rape, false imprisonment and two counts of assault occasioning actual bodily harm. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

The trial continues.