A rapist who attacked a woman just yards from the safety of her boyfriend's home has been jailed for seven and a half years.

Bhupendra Chavda, 21, followed his victim from a bus in Bushey before telling her he had a knife and forcing her to perform a sex act on him in a quiet alley.

Afterwards Chavda made the terrified woman drink from a can of cider before pouring the rest over her head in what the sentencing judge at St Albans Crown Court called a "humiliating and demeaning act".

Chavda, an accountant, had denied committing an offence of oral rape on July 28, last year, and claimed during the trial that the woman was a prostitute he had paid.

However the jury found him guilty after the victim told how the defendant followed her from the bus and struck up conversation with her, before raping her at the gate to her boyfriend's home.