A man who allegedly raped and stabbed his Facebook date and left her for dead was arrested by police despite going into her Facebook account and deleting all evidence they had chatted.
Eliza Dragne, 30, had kept their relationship secret from friends – but claims her Facebook date raped her, strangled her and stabbed her in the neck with a screwdriver, before fleeing. She managed to crawl to a road and flagged down a car.
She was taken by air ambulance to a hospital in Romanian capital Bucharest – and managed to identify the alleged killer Nicu Alin Cristea, 29, before slipping into a coma and dying.
Police said that the desperate struggle had taken hours because Ms Dragne’s injuries were so severe.
Mr Cristea was married, and a labourer, but is said to have spun a web of lies claiming that he was a single humanitarian aid worker helping orphaned children.
When they agreed to meet in a bar, Ms Dragne claimed he picked her up in his car – but then drove her to the outskirts of town, where he attacked.
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She said he beat her and raped her in a field in Alexandria in southern Romania’s Teleorman county.
After being flown to hospital, surgeons battled in vain to save her life – but she was able to carry out a brief interview with police where she named Mr Cristea as the man who had attacked her.
After giving the interview to detectives in the capital’s Bagdasar-Arseni hospital, she slipped into a coma and died as police were on their way to arrest him.
When police turned up at his door, the accused man was in the middle of a party with friends celebrating his one-month wedding anniversary.
He initially denied that he had ever had anything to do with her, but later admitted it when he was told that she was alive and that he had been named by her as the man who had stabbed and raped her.
Judges have ordered the man from the village of Calomfiresti, near Alexandria, to be kept in custody for a month while the investigation continues.
Eliza’s mother Rodica Dragne, 53, told local media she had been devastated by the loss of her daughter.
‘What can a mother feel when she sees her child like this? Why did he have to kill her and destroy her?’ she said.
‘He had a home and a marriage so why destroy my daughter’s life and chance of having the same?’
