American man Nicholas Rossi who faked his own death and fled to Scotland to escape rape charges is jailed

An American man who faked his own death and fled to Scotland to escape rape charges has been jailed.Nicholas Rossi, 38, from the US state of Rhode Island, has been sentenced to at least five years behind bars for raping two women in northern Utah in 2008. 
He is set to receive a second sentence in November too as he was separately convicted of each crime, in August and September respectively. 
The hearing in Salt Lake City, Utah, saw him handed an 'indeterminate' term - the state policy for sentencing, to provide a range of years, not a set number.   
His eventual release date will therefore be decided by the state parole board - and he could still get a life sentence. He will begin his first sentence immediately. 
Rossi, whose legal name is Nicholas Alahverdian, was first identified as the women's attacker in 2018 when a decade-old DNA rape kit was investigated.
But in February 2020, just months after he was charged in one of the cases, an obituary was published online claiming he had died of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
In fact, he had been living in Bristol, in the south-west of England, for some time before then - but the exact date he fled the States for Britain is unclear.
He eventually ended up in Scotland, where he lived under the radar until December 2021, when he was arrested at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow.  
While in hospital receiving treatment for Covid, staff had recognised his distinctive tattoos and reported him to authorities. 
Rossi said the wrong man had been caught, claiming he was an Irish orphan called Arthur Knight who was being framed. 
But in November 2022, it was concluded he was in fact Nicholas Rossi and after a long court battle, he was eventually extradited to the US in January last year. 
It eventually emerged he had used more than a dozen aliases over the years to escape detection.
This included the name Arthur Brown, which he went by when he married British woman Miranda Knight. 
He is thought to have met in Bristol before the couple later moved to Glasgow.   
One of his accusers, when taking the stand in August, said Rossi left a 'trail of fear, pain and destruction' in his wake. 
'This is not a plea for vengeance. This is a plea for safety and accountability, for recognition of the damage that will never fully heal,' she said. 
Prosecutor Brandon Simmons, meanwhile, said Rossi 'uses rape to control women' and is a threat to the public's safety. 
But the attacker has maintained his innocence, saying in a soft, raspy voice at his sentencing hearing: 'I am not guilty of this. These women are lying.'  
One of the two women he was convicted of raping first met him after she responded to a post he had made on advertising website Craiglist. 
Though she was recovering from a traumatic brain injury at the time, the pair began dating and got engaged within just a few weeks. 
The woman testified he had asked her to lend him money, pay for dates and car repairs and take out loans to buy their wedding rings. 
She told the court he raped her in his bedroom one night after driving her home. 
It was years later she reported it to the police, after she discovered another woman in Utah had also accused him of similar crimes.