A GIRL of 13 held her head in her hands and screamed as she told her mother she had been raped by a man in his 60s who had befriended them, a jury heard yesterday.

The child’s mother said Tariq Syed drove her daughter to woodland and threatened to kill her family if she told anyone what had happened.

Speaking on a video link between Bradford Crown Court and a courtroom in Romania, the woman said Syed bought the girl trousers, shoes and earrings and gave her a phone and an iPad.

The mother said she forbade Syed from giving more presents, saying she would buy her daughter the things herself.

On September 25, 2014, the girl came home in the afternoon with Syed.

“She was very pale and frightened and she said she had a headache and her tummy hurt,” the woman said, speaking with help of an interpreter.

The woman said she went to her daughter’s school the next day and was told she had been missing on two days that week, and that a man matching Syed’s description had picked her up.

She scolded her daughter, who then told her everything.

The woman said the child revealed she had “slept with” Syed in a wood and he had threatened her.

“She was very, very frightened. She used to hold her head and scream while she was telling me this,” the mother told the jury.

Syed, 64, of Pemberton Drive, Little Horton, Bradford, pleads not guilty to rape, an alternative charge of sexual activity with a child, perverting the course of justice and causing the girl’s mother actual bodily harm by attacking her with a knife.

After she had alerted the police, the woman said Syed came to the takeaway where she worked.

“He got close to me and I started screaming. He told me to get my kids and go back to Romania. The police can do nothing to him. If I would leave England, the police would close the file, and if I won’t go, he will kill me, and he starts cursing and slaps me.

“Before slapping me he told me he would give me £15,000 to go back to Romania. I told him 'no'. I refused. I told him 'I don’t need your money' and because of that he got close and he slapped me and he said that the police are afraid of him, and they are trembling in front of him.

“He had a small knife and he tried to stab me.”

Syed’s barrister, Jessica Strange, put it to the woman: “You told your daughter to say to the police that he’d raped her, didn’t you?”

The witness replied: “How can I destroy my daughter’s honour because of him?”

Miss Strange accused the woman of demanding money from Syed to stop her telling the police her daughter had been raped, and that she had attacked him with scissors at the takeaway.

The witness denied this, insisting that Syed assaulted her.

The trial continues.