Nicholas Rossi, the individual who pretended to be deceased, makes an appearance in a US court

After spending two years fighting extradition from Scotland to the United States, a man named Nicholas Rossi has appeared in a Utah court where he faced charges of rape. Despite his claims of mistaken identity and being an Irish orphan named Arthur Knight, Scottish judges rejected his arguments and sent him back to the US last month. During the court appearance, conducted through a prison video link, the 36-year-old was informed of the rape charge, which is a first-degree felony allegedly committed in September 2008 in Utah County. However, a separate charge of sexual battery was dismissed. Another hearing in the case has been scheduled for next month. Additionally, Rossi is also facing a separate rape allegation in Salt Lake County. He was arrested in December 2021 in Glasgow under an international arrest warrant, as he was admitted to a hospital with Covid. Despite maintaining his false identity, it was determined by a sheriff in Edinburgh that his tattoos and fingerprints matched those of Nicholas Rossi. After losing his final appeal against extradition in December of last year, prosecutors in Utah charged him with the rape of a 21-year-old woman, a crime that wasn't initially linked to him due to a DNA test kit backlog at the state's crime lab. In a previous hearing, Rossi had denied being Nicholas Rossi and insisted that his name was Arthur Knight Brown.