Woman says Chinese student predator raped her hours before second attack

Two women who reported being drugged and raped by prolific sex offender Zhenhao Zou said they were attacked within 24 hours of each other, the BBC has established.

The first woman who says she was raped told us she was shocked to learn about the second attack and had since felt guilt for not reporting her rape sooner.

Metropolitan Police detectives investigating Zou’s offences initially questioned whether the two women might be the same person, because the two attacks sounded identical and happened in such a short space of time.

This timing showed Zou was confident, a source familiar with the investigation told the BBC World Service. “He was getting away with it, so he wanted to do it more and more,” they said.

Warning: This story contains descriptions of sexual violence

Zou was sentenced to life in prison, with a minimum term of 24 years, in June.

The Chinese national was convicted for drugging and raping 10 women – three in the UK and seven in China – between September 2019 and May 2023. All victims appear to have been Chinese.

But after his trial, detectives – having described Zou as one of the UK’s “most prolific predators” – said they feared he may have attacked 50 more women.

Since Zou’s trial, 24 women have come forward in both the UK and China, including the victims of these two attacks.

The first woman, who we are calling Rachel, says she met Zou for drinks in late October 2022. He drove her to his waterside villa in Zhupingsha village, near the Chinese city of Dongguan, where he gave her a whisky cocktail that left her so dizzy that she says she could barely move. After she lay down upstairs to recover, she says he raped her.

Phone records and messages shared with the BBC reveal Rachel had tried to call a friend for help afterwards, but Zou had grabbed her phone from her and spoke to the friend himself.

Zou did not return Rachel’s phone to her until the following afternoon. In a series of frantic messages on the Chinese app WeChat, Rachel told her friend she was still in Zou’s house and asked why she hadn’t been able to come and get her.

Her friend explained that she had heard Rachel crying out for help on the phone, but that Zou wouldn’t reveal his address.

“My friend was afraid that if she kept asking, he’d go to extremes and hurt me,” Rachel later told the BBC. She says Zou ended up dropping her home just before 14:00. “The man treated me as a toy,” she said.

Rachel said she didn’t report her rape to police in China because she feared she did not have sufficient evidence and was worried about people finding out.

We do not know exactly what else was in the cocktail that Rachel drank, but when UK police raided Zou’s London apartment they found a substance called butanediol – which converts into date-rape drug GHB in the body.

Butanediol is a controlled substance in the UK, but it can be easily bought without a prescription in China to treat insomnia, where it costs as little as $3 (£2.22) per 500ml, the BBC has found.

Zou had also repeatedly searched online for information around the sleeping drug triazolam, which is a banned substance in the UK but available on prescription in China, according to evidence shown at his trial.

A screenshot of WeChat messages circulating among Zou’s former classmates, seen by the BBC, shows Zou had begun researching prescription sleeping pills in China in January 2020, asking a friend there if he knew anyone who had been prescribed them from whom he could “buy from directly”.

The second victim who was attacked on the same day in October 2022 is referred to as Female D, because her identity was not known to UK police at the time of Zou’s trial. He was, however, convicted of raping her using video evidence from his devices. She contacted UK police shortly after his trial ended in March 2025, having learned of his conviction.

Through documents shown at his trial, we have established that Zou met Female D for a date just a few hours after he had driven Rachel home. He drugged and raped her, filming the attack. In a victim impact statement read at Zou’s sentencing in June, Female D said that she had been unable to escape until 04:00 the following day.

Rachel – the first victim from late October 2022 – also decided to report her experiences to the Met Police in March 2025. With the help of an independent translator, she submitted an anonymous statement over email.

Responding to her report, a police officer sought more information on Rachel’s identity, saying it “seemed we may have already had contact with this person” and that the account sounded “very much identical to one we already have from this time period”.

Rachel said she clarified that she had never reported the case to Chinese or British police.

The BBC has verified that initials shared by the Met in the correspondence to check Rachel’s identity with her, in fact belonged to Female D.

The Met Police told us its investigation into Zou continued, including liaising with the Crown Prosecution Service around potential further charges.

Det Ch Insp Tariq Farooqi said: “The scale of his offending – which spanned two continents – makes him one of the most dangerous sexual offenders the Met has ever brought to justice.”

In her victim impact statement, Female D said she had been haunted by nightmares after the attack and “couldn’t be alone after dark”.

Rachel says she feels if she had called the police the next day, Female D might not have become a victim. “I know everyone will say this is his fault, not mine, but I still feel sorry.”

Since his conviction, former schoolfriends of Zou in China have revealed how he asked them for advice about assembling spy cameras that may have helped him keep a record of his crimes – including just before UK police first arrested him.

A series of messages, shared with the BBC, appear to show Zou asking one friend for advice about building mini cameras on 21 December 2023. Documents submitted to court during Zou’s trial show he searched online for “hidden camera” and “electric alarm clock camera” on the same day and made purchases on eBay of surveillance equipment.

Zou messaged the same friend once again on 17 January 2024.

He was arrested by police seven days later.

During a search of his London apartment, police later found a spy camera in a box alongside a memory card containing video evidence of his rapes.

• Details of help and support with sexual violence are available at BBC Action Line

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You can speak to BBC journalist wanqing.zhang@bbc.co.uk in Chinese or English – please include contact details if you are willing to speak to her.