A 30-year-old asylum seeker in Belgium has been sentenced to four years imprisonment after he raped a mentally disabled woman hoping to get her pregnant so he could use the child as an excuse to remain in the country.

The migrant, named Karim, met with the 19-year-old girl in November 2014 in the city of Liege and held her for three days at a squat where he was living, raping her repeatedly, Belgian newspaper La Dernière Heure reports.

The mother of the girl, who despite being 19 is said to have a mental capacity equal to a seven or eight-year-old child, told the court that 30-year-old Karim wanted to get the girl pregnant as he had previously been deported from the country and banned from living there for six years.

Karim actively prevented the girl from using any sort of contraception and accompanied her to a medical clinic to see if she had become pregnant, the victim’s mother said in testimony.

Protest After Migrants Gang Rape Woman In Wheelchair https://t.co/28qX8jpXlE pic.twitter.com/S6uEFh8X3W — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) October 12, 2016

The victim claimed that Karim had threatened her and beaten her while raping her to the point where she bled; he also forced her to take sleeping pills.

The asylum seeker has denied the charges against him saying that a mutual acquaintance had been the actual perpetrator and that he had been set up in a revenge plot.

The case echoes other similar attacks across Europe in recent years. In September 2016, outraged residents in the Swedish town of Visby took to the streets in protest after it was revealed that a group of five asylum seekers had raped a wheelchair-bound woman and were released from custody only days later.

In April 2017, an 18-year-old Somali migrant in the German town of Neuenhaus was charged with raping a paralysed 59-year-old man after breaking into a care home. He then raped a second man in another room and killed the man’s 87-year-old wife because she had witnessed the assault.