Joseph McCann: Judge to hold hearing in prison after ‘serial rapist’ refuses to appear in court

Court will be set up in the HMP Belmarsh visitors' room, chief magistrate says

Joseph McCann is being held at HMP Belmarsh in London. (Metropolitan Police)

Joseph McCann has refused to appear in court to face multiple rape charges for the second day in a row, so a senior judge will visit him in prison instead.

Chief magistrate Emma Arbuthnot is due to conduct a hearing at Belmarsh prison after Mr McCann twice refused to leave his cell.

Prosecutor Tetteh Turkson told Westminster Magistrates’ Court that Mr McCann was “not being co-operative”.

Ms Arbuthnot added that there were “negotiations going on” to ensure he appeared by videolink.

However, the chief magistrate later decided to conduct a hearing that would be open to the media would in the visitors room at HM Prison Belmarsh.

Mr McCann, from Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, has been charged with 12 offences, including five rapes.

He was arrested near Congleton, in Cheshire earlier this week, more than two weeks after he is said to have abducted a woman in her 20s.

He is alleged to have kidnapped her in Watford in the early hours of Sunday 21 April. He is then accused of raping her inside a home.

Mr McCann faces two further charges of kidnapping, four more counts of rape, one of false imprisonment, two of causing a female to engage in sexual activity and one of assaulting a female by penetration in London between 24 and 27 April.

The charges relate to two women, also in their 20s, who were separately abducted off the street in Chingford and Edgware, in the capital, before they were raped in a car.

Prosecutors are expected to add nine more charges to the indictment.

Additional reporting by PA