Negasi Zuberi used “power, control and sexual domination” to kidnap and rape two women and hold them in his Klamath Falls home last year using a plan he called “Operation Take Over,” a prosecutor told jurors Tuesday.

Zuberi’s defense lawyer countered that the government has relied on unreliable accusations to build an epic federal case expected to include more than 450 exhibits and more than 50 prosecution witnesses.

Zuberi, 30, doesn’t dispute he had sex with each woman but said it was consensual, said his lawyer, Amy E. Potter.

A 12-member jury and four alternates heard the vastly different accounts of Zuberi’s actions in May and July 2023 during opening statements as Zuberi’s trial began in the James A. Redden U.S. Courthouse in downtown Medford.

Zuberi has pleaded not guilty to two counts of kidnapping, two counts of being a felon in possession of guns and ammunition, two counts of being a felon with ammunition and one count of transportation for criminal sexual activity.

He sat between his two defense lawyers, facing the jury box. He looked at the photos and videos that the prosecution presented to jurors and also turned at times to look at people seated in the public gallery.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Nathan J. Lichvarcik held up evidence bags containing handcuffs, leg irons, cellphone jammers and a Taser that he said Zuberi used to abduct and hold the women. Investigators found them in Zuberi’s car, his home and a trailer he owned, Lichvarcik said.

He said jurors would hear from a 22-year-old Washington woman, a commercial sex worker, who got into Zuberi’s white Honda Pilot the night of July 15 in Seattle but then ended up in handcuffs and leg irons in the back of the car as Zuberi claimed he was an undercover officer taking her to a holding cell.

As Zuberi drove more than 400 miles to Klamath Falls, he pulled over, ordered the woman to perform oral sex on him and raped her, Lichvarcik said.

Zuberi placed a sweatshirt over the woman’s head as he continued the drive and locked her in a cinderblock cell in the garage once he got home, Lichvarcik said.

The 120-pound woman bit off the tips of her nails and started punching the metal screen door of the cell before squeezing through a narrow opening to escape the next morning, according to the prosecutor.

She grabbed a handgun out of the parked Honda Pilot and scaled a fence outside the home, Lichvarcik told jurors. Bleeding and screaming, “He raped me!” she flagged down a motorist who was on her way to a convention in Klamath Falls, Lichvarcik said.

Prosecutors will bring the black metal door to court and display numerous photos of the cell and receipts from Zuberi’s Home Depot purchases of cinder blocks, he said.

Forensic experts will describe how they used DNA analysis to detect the Washington woman’s blood on the metal door as well as on the wooden fence outside the house, Lichvarcik said.

Potter, Zuberi’s lawyer, urged jurors to consider that the government hasn’t charged Zuberi with rape. The Washington woman got in Zuberi’s car voluntarily and then fell asleep in the structure that prosecutors call a cell at the Klamath Falls home, Potter said.

“Does that make sense?” she asked. “The government called it a cell, but it’s simply a cinder block structure for music or extra space. Just remember that there are reasons to have a structure other than the story the government has told.”

Potter told jurors not to be swayed by what she described as extraneous evidence that the government will show them.

The so-called “Operation Take Over” wasn’t some “grand plan,” she said, pointing out that Zuberi didn’t even follow the first line of it that read, “leave phone at home.”

She claimed the guns and ammunition found in Zuberi’s house and trailer were “left behind” by a former tenant.

“We don’t dispute he had sex with either women, or that they were in his car,” Potter said. The fact that their DNA is found in his car or on handcuffs in his home, “doesn’t prove there was a kidnapping,” she said.

After the Washington woman’s reported kidnapping, the FBI learned of a local Klamath Falls woman who two months earlier had accused Zuberi of taking her from a local bar called The Pikey, holding her in his garage for 12 hours and sexually assaulting her in May 2023.

Lichvarcik, the prosecutor, said that Zuberi had locked eyes with her in the bar at one point and then left with his roommates and came back alone. Video showed Zuberi and the local woman walking away from the bar together at 1:08 am. on May 6, 2023.

She remembered walking down the sidewalk with him but didn’t remember getting into his car, Lichvarcik said. She reported that Zuberi hit her multiple times in the head and fired a Taser stun gun into her ribs after she was screaming at him for driving erratically and too fast, he said.

She told investigators that Zuberi placed black handcuffs on her wrists and silver cuffs around her ankles, put a dark sweatshirt over her head and took her to his garage, where he forced her to have sex in the back seat of the car, the Lichvarcik said.

“Want to have sex? If so, you won’t get hurt,” she said he told her, according to the prosecutor. At one point, Zuberi told her to “make it look real” and videotaped her using his cellphone, threatening that if she ever reported what he was doing, he’d play the video, Lichvarcik said.

The Klamath Falls woman reported the abduction and sexual assault to local police.

“From her perspective, local police did not take it seriously, didn’t follow up and left (her) really frustrated,” Lichvarcik told jurors.

Prosecutors found the cellphone video that Zuberi took in his phone’s iCloud storage, but it’s Zuberi’s defense lawyers who plan to play it for jurors.

Potter argued that the Klamath Falls woman’s account changed over time and her injuries weren’t consistent with what she said occurred.

In the video, the woman is heard telling Zuberi he’s attractive and asks him to stop videotaping her and he does, Potter said. Then he drove her to an ATM, gave her $300 and dropped her off near her home, according to the prosecutor and defense lawyer.

“How many kidnappers drop their alleged kidnappers back home?” Potter asked.

Police arrested Zuberi on July 16 in a Walmart parking lot in Reno, Nevada, tracked there through his cellphone.

Prosecutors played video and jail audio of several remarks Zuberi made to police.

As a police hostage negotiator spoke to Zuberi via FaceTime to convince him to get out of his car at the Walmart, Zuberi was seen in the driver’s seat grabbing a knife and slicing himself in the lower left leg. He remarked, “I can’t even kill myself right,” according to video played in court.

At one point, an officer told him he had just obtained some information from an Oregon detective and would share it with him once he surrendered.

“The info in Oregon is I’m (expletive),” Zuberi is heard responding.

During a ride from the scene in an ambulance after his arrest, an officer told Zuberi he was being charged with a probation violation, according to body camera footage shown to jurors.

“What about the other (expletive)?” Zuberi blurted out, as he lay on a stretcher in the back of the ambulance. He later asked the officer, “Is your camera on?”

And during a jail call played for jurors, Zuberi is heard saying the gun charges are “not a what if,” but a “guaranteed conviction.”

Both the Washington woman and the Klamath Falls woman are scheduled to testify during the three-week trial.