A TAXI driver who fled abroad to avoid a rape charge has been convicted of the sex attack.

Arshad Mohammed had to be extradited back to Scotland from Norway after a two-year hunt.

Mohammed, 48, drove his 19-year-old victim down a dead-end lane and forced himself on her in the back seat of his Skoda in November 2010.

He abducted her only minutes after she got into his minicab in her pyjamas - with a coat on top - following an evening at a friend's house, watching the X Factor.

After the attack he told her: "See you after, princess".

She went round to a friend's house in tears, and the police were called.

Mohammed, who drove for city firm 50-50 Cabs and was described as having "more than one teenage daughter" and a wife in Pakistan, was caught several months later after he targeted two other lone, teenagers.

He was detained by police twice, in March and April 2011, after he subjected both the girls to explicit sex talk.

After the girls reported him, he was required to give a DNA sample and his genetic code turned out to match the DNA on a swab taken from the rape victim, and he was arrested.

Pakistan-born Mohammed, who holds Italian citizenship, appeared at Paisley Sheriff Court on June 13 2011, and was granted bail but immediately broke the conditions.

Prosecutor Jane Farquharson said: "It is understood he left the country the next day."

He was arrested in Norway on a European Arrest Warrant two years later, and extradited back to the UK last August.

After a six-day trial at the High Court in Stirling, jurors took three hours to find him guilty, by majority, of abducting the girl in his taxi and raping her.

He was also found guilty, unanimously of two charges of breach of the peace for uttering the remarks to the 17 year old girls.

Judge Lord Matthews said there was a "substantial sexual element" to the breaches of the peace.

Mohammed insisted there were cultural differences in attitudes to sex between Scotland and Pakistan, and children here knew about sex early.

During his five-day trial, the rape victim, now 24, gave evidence from behind a screen.

She recalled her terror when Mohammed stopped the engine, got into the back seat with her, and raped her.

She said: "He put the locks on so I wouldn't get out of the car... I tried to push him away.

"I was shouting for somebody to come and help me, but nobody was around."

Lord Matthews placed Mohammed on the sex offenders' register and said he faced a sentence of "years".

He deferred sentence until May 1 and remanded him in custody.