A young woman from China who was allegedly raped while studying in Germany has returned to Europe to face her suspected attacker in court.

While not required to testify in person, the unnamed 21-year-old rape victim flew back to Germany from Beijing to witness the beginning of the trial against a 32-year-old Iraqi refugee identified as Ziyad K.

The suspect, who was seeking asylum in Germany, was charged with the rape of the female student and strangling another student at Ruhr-University Bochum in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia last summer.

Ziyad is also being investigated for the rape of a 27-year-old student, also Chinese, on the campus in November of last year, according to Express.

The court was planning to hear her testimony in private at the request her lawyer, Doerte Ganzer, but the victim decided against it when Judge Volker Talarowski was instructing for court visitors to leave.

“This is not necessary. I keep talking until it gets too much for me,” the rape victim was quoted as saying.

In her testimony, the student narrated that she was on her way back from a supermarket when she was grabbed by her attacker from behind. The suspect allegedly held her in a stranglehold and dragged her into the woods.

“He took a noose and pulled it around my neck,” she explained. “Then he took a branch and hit my backside. I became dizzy, I saw black.”

She detailed how the alleged rapist pushed his hand into her pants and raped her soon after. At that point, she noted that she could hardly breathe as the man had reportedly tightened the noose around her neck.

“At that moment, I thought I was only 21 years old and had to die far from home,” she stated.

Local authorities were able to track Ziyad and had him arrested at an asylum center in Bochum after he was positively linked via DNA evidence and the GPS location stored in his mobile phone matching his location in the university campus at the time of the rapes.

Talarowski had given Ziyad an option to confess to negate the need for the victims to make a statement, with a possible mitigation of his sentencing.