'Night stalker' rape suspect charged

Delroy Grantm, appeared in court on Monday, was charged with five rapes, six indecent assaults and 11 burglaries.

He was arrested as part of Operation Minstead which was set up to find the sex attacker, dubbed the “night stalker”, who is thought to have carried out dozens of sex attacks over the last 17 years. The police arrested Grant as he returned to his car in south east London in the early hours of Sunday.
The investigation into the series of attacks, which involved rapes and sexual assaults, is the largest operation in the Metropolitan police’s recent past. It has involved thousands of police hours, specialist ancestral DNA analysis, and DNA tests on more than 2,000 individuals.

The police believe the attacker has carried out attacks on more than 108 elderly people, aged between 68 and 88, which were carried out in south-east London and date back to the early 1990s. The incidents took place in clusters in south and south east London, including Dulwich, Orpington, Norwood, Downham, Lee, Croydon, West Wickham and Bickley.

During the past 17 years, the rapist has offended in patterns of a concentrated series of attacks, followed by a lull, which led detectives to speculate that he may have lived abroad.