Alleged serial rapist Joseph McCann will be visited by senior judge in jail after he refused to appear in court for a second day.
In an unprecedented move, Chief Magistrate Emma Arbuthnot will conduct a hearing at Belmarsh prison after McCann refused to leave the cells.
Prosecutor Tetteh Turkson told Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Thursday McCann that was “not being co-operative” and Arbuthnot said there were “negotiations going on” to ensure he appeared by videolink.
But later the chief magistrate said a hearing open to the Press would instead be held in the visitors’ room at Belmarsh.
McCann, from Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, has been charged with 12 offences, including five rapes.
He was arrested near Congleton, in Cheshire, in the early hours of Monday, just over two weeks after he is alleged to have abducted a woman in her 20s in Watford in the early hours of Sunday April 21 before raping her in a residential property. He is charged with kidnap and rape over the alleged attack.
McCann is further charged with two kidnappings, four counts of rape, one count of false imprisonment, two counts of causing a female to engage in sexual activity and one count of assaulting a female by penetration in London between April 24 and April 27.
The charges relate to two women, who are in their 20s, who were separately snatched off the street in Chingford and Edgware, in London, before being raped in a car. Nine more charges are expected to be added to the indictment.