German court jails Chinese doctor over ‘Driving School’ rape network

A Berlin court on Wednesday jailed a Chinese doctor for five years for his role in an online sexual abuse network that operated under the code name “Driving School for Experts”.

Shao Zhiting was found guilty of “repeatedly provided medical advice on sedating women” who were victims of the network, according to a court statement.

The 32-year-old was also convicted of sexually assaulting his fiancée, the court said.

There have been a series of trials related to the network, run via a Telegram chat group, which has attracted significant interest among the Chinese community in Germany and drew large courtroom audiences.

The network’s members used code words to try to disguise their actions — a “car ride” was code for a rape and “dead pigs” referred to their victims, women who had usually been heavily sedated.

Eight men — all but one of them Chinese — have been implicated in the “Driving School” network, called the “Fahrschule fuer Experten” in German.

Shao was found guilty of having advised the other men on how to dose drugs such as triazolam, a sedative mainly used to treat insomnia.

His crimes were “extremely misogynistic, as the women concerned were degraded to mere objects of sexual desire”, the court found.

His advice helped the group leader, Zhang Dapeng, to rape a woman in January 2024, according to the court.

A Frankfurt court in February sentenced Zhang to 14 years in jail for seven rapes and four attempted murders.

Another group member, 28-year-old Chinese master’s student in robotics named only as J. Zhongyi, was sentenced to 11 years and three months in jail for repeatedly drugging and raping his girlfriend and filming the abuse.

The cases have evoked that of Gisele Pelicot, the Frenchwoman who waived her right to anonymity during the 2024 trial of her ex-husband and dozens of strangers who raped her while she was unconscious.

The German hearings have drawn less attention but caused a social media buzz and a number of mostly Chinese women have been closely following the hearings.