Local News in Brief : Clerk to Stand Trial in Canyon Country Rape

An unemployed Hollywood accounting clerk who is suspected of kidnaping and sexually assaulting at least six prostitutes at a remote area near Canyon Country was ordered Tuesday to stand trial on five charges stemming from one of the alleged attacks.

Rabih Alkharsa, 33, was arrested in May by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies who had staked out a utility road in the area where several of the attacks had taken place, Deputy Robert Bullard testified Tuesday during Alkharsa’s preliminary hearing in San Fernando Municipal Court.

Bullard said a 17-year-old prostitute who was with Alkharsa when deputies made the arrest ran hysterically from the car and “grabbed my arm . . . and hung on to it so tightly that I ultimately had trouble getting her to release it.”

“She said, ‘He raped me. He said he was going to kill me. My God, he was going to kill me,’ ” Bullard testified.

Bullard said there were at least six reports of similar sexual assaults in the area. But Deputy Dist. Atty. Kenneth Loveman said only one of the women who reported an attack could be located to appear at the preliminary hearing.

Loveman said he would file charges in the other cases if he finds the other women, including the teen-ager who was with Alkharsa when he was arrested.

A 20-year-old woman testified Tuesday that she had been a prostitute in 1984 but was not working as such when Alkharsa approached her in Hollywood on April 13, 1985.

She said Alkharsa ordered her into his car, telling her that he was a vice officer and that she “was going to jail.”

“But then we got on the freeway and I knew we weren’t going to jail,” she said.

She said Alkharsa drove her to a dirt road near Canyon Country, where he repeatedly raped and sodomized her.

Alkharsa, who is free on $50,000 bail, is scheduled for arraignment in San Fernando Superior Court on Sept. 17.