A RAPIST who preyed on a drunken teenager has won the first stage of a battle to get his life sentence overturned.

Arshad Arif, 29, of Belfast Avenue, Slough, had already served a five-year sentence for raping a 17-year-old, when he himself was a teenager, when he took the youngster to Salt Hill Park, Slough, and forced himself on her in 2012.

He had picked her up outside a nightclub in Watford after she had lost her friends and phone after a night out.

Arif told his victim to give him oral sex, then, because the girl was crying too much to carry out his brutal orders, he stripped and raped her.

He denied the offences, but was convicted at Reading Crown Court and, in September last year, and jailed for life.

He was ordered to serve a minimum of six and a half years before he would be considered for parole.

But on Thursday last week (31), Lord Justice Beatson, Mr Justice Holroyde and Judge Guy Boney, sitting at London’s Criminal Appeal Court, granted him permission to appeal against the life sentence.

During his trial, Arif had protested his innocence and told the jury: “I would never think of raping anyone.” But his claim was made to look foolish when the prosecution told the jury he had admitted raping a 17-year-old a decade earlier and served a five-year sentence for that crime.

He applied for permission to appeal against his convictions on the basis that jurors should not have been told about that.

That challenge was rejected, but Mr Justice Holroyde granted him permission to appeal against his open-ended sentence.

The judge said that Arif had 'entrenched views of sexual entitlement and a mistrust of women’ that would take years of therapeutic work to cure.

But he added that it was 'at least arguable’ that, however horrific his crimes, he should not have been given life.

The full hearing of Arif’s appeal will take place at an unspecified later date.