22/2/2024

Brooming Gangs

The bristles of Martin dePorress continued 2/3

Huddersfield

The Huddersfield grooming gang was a group of men who were convicted of sexual offences against girls in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom. It was the largest gang ever convicted for sex abuse in the United Kingdom. The offences took place between 2004 and 2011, and the men were charged following the Operation Tendersea inquiry by the police.

Banaris Hussain aged 36; conivcted and imprisoned for 10 years
Zahid Hassan aged 29; conivcted and imprisoned for 18 years

The trials began in April 2017 and 20 men were convicted in 2018 in three separate trials. Since then, further men have been convicted in a series of trials, bringing the total number of men convicted to 35 by April 2020 for a total of 380 years. A report released in June 2019 indicated that 15 of the 22 females involved were known to children's services. Although there was “sufficient evidence” that two girls were being sexually exploited, one as early as 2007, no action was taken by the Kirklees Children's services.

The first 20 men convicted are all of Asian — mainly Pakistani — origin. Their ringleader was Amere Singh Dhaliwal, a British Indian, who converted to Sikhism in 2013. One of the grooming gang members, Sajid Hussain, fled during the trial and was sentenced in his absence. Two more men were sentenced in June 2019. Mohammed Akram was previously convicted and had his sentenced increased, whilst Usman Khalid was sentenced to five years.

20 men were jailed for a total of more than 250 years for abuse in Huddersfield.

“The more I talked to experts in the field, the more convinced I became that there was no dominant ethnicity among the perpetrators. They came from different ethnic backgrounds in different towns and could be white, black or Asian. Some, such as the British National Party, have tried to make this a racial issue. I do not believe that it is.”.

Barry Sheerman, Child Prostitution Debate 2009, Labour MP, Huddersfield

A further five men were jailed in November 2019 under Operation Tendersea. Three of the men were not named for legal reasons whilst Umar Zaman fled to Pakistan and was sentenced in his absence. Seven more men were convicted in February 2020. A man was convicted in April 2020 along with another previously unnamed man, Shaqeel Hussai, who was sentenced to a further 12 months.

Report just in (Monday November 29, 2021) that Thirty nine men and three women have been charged with offences as part of a Kirklees Police operation into child sexual offending. The men and women, who are largely from the Kirklees area, have been charged with a variety of mainly sexual offences as part of an investigation into non-recent child sexual exploitation. The allegations against the defendants involve offences committed against six female victims, who were children at the time the alleged offending began. Those alleged offences occurred between 1995 and 2015, largely in the Dewsbury and Batley areas of Kirklees.

Those charged are:

Update 2nd March 2022: A teenage girl was groomed and abused by up to 300 men in Yorkshire by the time she was 17. Leeds Crown Court heard her family contacted social services after she returned home, often under the influence of drinks and drugs, and dishevelled. During one incident she returned to her family home naked from the waist down. The court heard the girl was forced into sexual activity with the men who would prey on her. One terrifying incident saw a man hold a knife to her throat while he assaulted her.

Nasarat Hussain Jailed was for a further two years on 2nd March 2022.

Prosecutor Kate Batty told the court the girl's parents was told by social services on one occasion that "she must love it if she keeps going back.". One of the men that abused the girl was Nasarat Hussain. Hussain was 17 at the time he tried to rape the girl in a bathroom at a house in Moorbottom Road, Huddersfield. The house was regularly used by a grooming gang to abuse vulnerable teenage girls from the area. Hussain, who is now 33, was known to the girl as "nurse" and attempted to rape her in a bathroom.

Judge Marson jailed Hussain for a further two years and added that his victim was:

“particularly vulnerable and everybody knew that and at the time you abused her you played your part in her psychological harm.”.

Ms Batty said the girl was "ragged about" and Hussain "pulled at her arms and head" before she told him she needed a glass of water. In a statement to the court the woman said the abuse she suffered as a teenager has led to her suffering depression, anxiety and low self-esteem. She has also been diagnosed with PTSD (Post-Traumatic Street Disorder) and bulimia.

Abdul Rehman
Nahman Mohammed
Mohammed Kammer
Mohammed Imran Ibrar
Wiqas Mahmud

FIVE men have been jailed for a combined total of 28 years after being convicted of non-recent child sexual abuse. Mohammed Kammer, Nahman Mohammed, Wiqas Mahmud, Mohammed Imran Ibrar, and Abdul Rehman had pleaded not guilty and stood trial in January and February 2023. The trial, which concluded at Leeds Crown Court on February 9, saw five men convicted for the second time after previously being jailed in earlier Operation Tendersea trials.

The sentences were:

Operation Tendersea has been a long-running West Yorkshire Police investigation. Trials for Operation Tendersea began in 2018 and have resulted in the conviction of 42 men, some of whom have been tried more than once during the court process. April‘s convictions mean a total of 505 years and six months in prison have now been handed down to those convicted during the court process.

Dewsbury

A gang of "devious and manipulative" men who raped, trafficked and groomed two teenage girls were jailed in September 2016. The four abused a 13 year old and a 15 year old at a flat in Dewsbury in 2014. sWest Yorkshire Police said the gang had preyed on "the most vulnerable people in our communities".

Ismail Haji
Imran Haji
Ibrahim Kola
Mohammed Chothia

The prosecutions came after the 13-year-old victim told a school welfare officer she had been seriously sexually assaulted. She first met Chothia, a factory worker of Hirstlands Road, Batley, and Ismail Haji, a former taxi driver of Rotary Close, Dewsbury, in August in Thornes Park, Wakefield, along with a 15-year-old girl.

The pair were later introduced to shop assistant Imran Haji, of Manor Way, Batley, and Kola, a factory worker of School Crescent, Dewsbury. The girls were subjected to sexual assaults at the property in Dewsbury. The 13-year-old was also abused at another address. Det Insp Lis Walker of West Yorkshire Police said: "These men took advantage of young and vulnerable victims for the sole purpose of sexually abusing them. "They were devious and manipulative in order to achieve their vile objectives." Ch Supt Mabs Hussain said the gang "behaved in a reprehensible fashion and targeted some of the most vulnerable people in our communities".

In 2020 police began probing an alleged grooming gang have charged 32 men with almost 200 offences against girls as young as 13. The alleged offences date from 1999 to 2012 against eight girls in Kirklees, Bradford and Wakefield. Police say the men are charged with a number of offences - including rape, sexual activity with a child, trafficking and false imprisonment.

There are 196 counts among the defendants in total against eight girls aged between 13 and 16. They were held by cops probing non-recent child sexual exploitation in parts of West Yorkshire as part of Operation Tourway. Cops say some of the victims were also subjected to offences when they were young adults.

Derby

The Derby child sex abuse ring was a group of men who sexually abused up to a hundred girls in Derby, England. In 2010, after an undercover investigation by Derbyshire police, members of the ring were charged with 75 offences relating to 26 girls. Nine of the 13 accused were convicted of grooming and raping girls between 12 and 18 years old. The attacks provoked fierce discussion about race and sexual exploitation. The thirteen men lived throughout Derby, and the police believed they met through a shared attraction for young girls.

The leaders were Abid Mohammed Saddique and Mohammed Romaan Liaqat, both married men with young children. They would cruise around the streets of Derby, targeting young girls. CCTV footage showed the gang leaders making repeated efforts to entice a pair of girls standing by the side of the road into their car. The police later discovered vodka and plastic cups under the car seats. Saddique was accused of having sexual activity with a 12-year-old in Darley Park, and Liaqat had sex with a 14-year-old in their vehicle.

The victims, aged between 12 and 18, were predominantly vulnerable girls from troubled backgrounds, and some of them were in care and known to social services. The men would target girls at railway stations, on estates, and walking home from school. The gang would first befriend the girls, inviting them out for a drive or a drink and supplied them with alcohol and drugs. The grooming process was then intensified, the girls were invited to parties, and further meetings were arranged. The girls were then driven to secluded areas and were sexually abused and raped.

Mohammed Liaqat
Abid Saddique
Akshay Kumar
Graham Blackham
Mohammed Imran Rehman
Ziafat Yasin

The abuse took place in houses and hotels across the Midlands, parks and even the victims' own homes. Two victims were threatened with hammers, while another was locked up before being raped. Sometimes, up to six men would be involved in the often violent assaults, which the gang would film on their mobile phones. Three gang members were filmed having sex with a 14-year-old girl in a hotel room to the sound of noisy cheering.

“Mohammed Shafiq, the director of the Ramadhan Foundation, said that an abhorrent form of racism in parts of the British Pakistani community fuelled the abuse, and that some young men did not see white girls as equal to their own daughters or sisters.”.

Some of the girls were locked up to prevent them from escaping. A 16-year-old victim stated: “I will never ever understand what has made them so evil and ignorant that still to this day they think they've not done anything wrong. The Derby case was one of several cases which prompted investigations looking into the claim that "the majority of the perpetrators have been British Pakistani"; the first was by Quilliam in December 2017, which released a report entitled "Group Based Child Sexual Exploitation – Dissecting Grooming Gangs", which claimed 84% of offenders were of South Asian heritage.

Banbury

The Banbury child sex abuse ring was a group of six men who committed serious sexual offences against under-aged girls in the English town of Banbury, Oxfordshire. In March 2015, they were found guilty of offences including rape and sexual activity with a child over a period extending from 2009 to 2014. Police in Banbury had drawn on the lessons of Operation Bullfinch, which targeted sexual abuse in nearby Oxford.

“It gradually started to become more people. He asked me if I would work for him and I said 'No' and I just laughed it off but, as I realise now, I did it without even knowing - [I did] sex work. I thought it was okay, because I was brainwashed. They made me think it was my decision but it wasn't.”.

The men targeted vulnerable girls, using social media to organize parties at which the girls were groomed. The men used gifts and apparent displays of affection towards the girls, winning their trust before initiating abusive sexual relationships. Offences took place in cars, woods and in the men's private homes. Charges concerning seven victims aged from 13 to 15 were included in the prosecution case. The offences were rape, sexual activity with a child and inciting a child to engage in sexual activity.

The six men were named as:

In March 2017, several others were arrested in connection with raping young girls.

Detective Inspector Steve Raffield of Banbury police was quoted as saying that the offenders “abused the trust of the vulnerable young victims for the purpose of their own sexual gratification”. He described the offences as “horrific” crimes that would “have a lasting impact upon the victims’ lives.” He condemned the offenders for pleading not guilty and forcing the victims “to relive their experiences by giving evidence in court.” He concluded by thanking the victims for the courage they showed in giving evidence, which had helped secure convictions of the accused men.

Ahmed Hassan-Sule
Kagiso Manase
Takudzwa Hova
Mohamed Saleh
Said Saleh
Zsolt Szaltoni

The Banbury MP Sir Tony Baldry was disturbed by tactics used by the defence during the trial, writing to the Lord Chancellor to express his concern at reference to the victims as willing participants who were falsely claiming abuse because “it is better to be a victim than a slag”. Defence counsel also alleged the case had been “manufactured” by the police and that the victims had been “brainwashed by social workers”.

Manchester

The Manchester child sex abuse ring was a group of men who committed serious sexual offences against under-aged girls in Manchester, England, between 2016 and 2018. Four members were jailed in September 2019, while others evaded arrest by fleeing the country. The gang repeatedly raped underage girls in Manchester between 2016 and 2018. Greater Manchester Police said the abuse was perpetrated by a “sophisticated grooming operation by males operating in that area”. Three victims aged 12 to 15 were identified.

Parizian Calin
Adrian Calin

The men groomed the victims by inundating them with Facebook messages asking them to meet them. Then the men brought the girls away to be raped. One 12-year-old girl was raped by at least four men. Another girl, aged 13, was groomed and made to have sex with a gang member three times. One of those times, she was kidnapped. Superintendent Rebecca Boyce said the perpetrators, who are all Romanian, are “not representative of their wider [Romanian] community — they are four individuals within that community”.

Ilie Daniel Baltatu
Sebastian Balatu

In September 2019, Judge Suzanne Goddard QC jailed four of the abusers for a total of 25 years for their “appalling” crimes, which she condemned as “heartless, immoral and illegal”. The four men were also placed on the sexual offenders register, three of them permanently. Three received sexual harm prevention orders of varying lengths. One had previously been jailed for dangerous driving.

The impact on the victims was severe and prolonged. All the known victims were forced to move out of Manchester to escape the abuse. One said: “No words can explain what I was put through. […] Now I can't even go in my corner shop without being anxious or scared any more. The impact this has had on my life has been unbelievable.” Another said: “I feel sick when I think about what these people were doing. I think there might be even more victims that we don't know about.”.

Report

A report commissioned by the Mayor of Greater Manchester found that police systematically overlooked crimes committed by an “Asian” grooming gang for fear of appearing racist. In the early 2000s, a grooming gang comprised of 97 men from South Asian backgrounds was able to roam free in Manchester, abusing at least 57 young girls, as members of the Greater Manchester Police (GMP) were told to focus on apprehending offenders of “other ethnicities”.

The report, commissioned by Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, found:

Members of the “Asian” paedophile ring sexually abused young girls, using drugs to make their victims compliant, leading to the death of a 15-year-old girl, Victoria Agoglia, who was injected with heroin by a 50-year-old man, leading to an overdose which killed her in 2003.

Victoria Agoglia, who died in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, aged just 15 in 2003

At the time of her death, Agoglia was under the care of Manchester City Council, which the report claims was privy to “multiple threats, sexual assaults and serious sexual exploitation”. The report admits the council did nothing to prevent her death and that her murderer remains unpunished to this day.

Case Files

Girl, 12, went to police station to report sexual assault — but officers sent her away with OTHER abusers who went on to rape her 15 times

Oldham

In 2021 a new police unit to investigate child sex grooming gangs in Greater Manchester identified more than 800 offenders. Across the force there are now 70 investigations which involve multiple victims of child sexual exploitation. A total of 468 victims have been discovered of whom 332 have been identified. Police say there are 809 offenders of whom 540 are known. In addition there are "hundreds of cases" where a single victim is involved.

Rusholme

After the death of Victoria Agoglia, aged 15, in 2003, Augusta, was set up to see if there was a wider issue of child sexual exploitation in south Manchester. Victoria was sexually abused and injected with heroin. Officers managed to identify a network of nearly 100 men potentially involved in the abuse of scores of girls via takeaways in and around Rusholme, but Augusta was shut down shortly afterwards due to resources, ‘rather than a sound understanding’ of whether lines of inquiry had been exhausted.

Hardly any charges were made against the men identified by the operation. Eight of them later went on to commit serious sexual crimes, including the rape of a child, the rape of a young woman, sexual assault and sexual activity with a child.

Leeds

Four men from Leeds have been jailed for a total of 51 years after a ‘shocking catalogue of child sexual exploitation’ was uncovered. A jury at Leeds Crown Court were told earlier this month how a group of up to ten men had systematically groomed a 13-year-old victim by plying her with ‘cigarettes, alcohol and drugs’. Sentencing the four Leeds men, Judge Geoffrey Marson, QC said none of the defendants had shown any type of remorse for their actions during the six-week trial.

Andrew Penhale, Deputy Chief Crown Prosecutor, CPS Yorkshire and Humberside said there was a severe ‘breaching of trust’ from all the men convicted. “Ten individuals have been convicted of offences which involve a shocking catalogue of child sexual exploitation,” he said. “The victim was targeted by older men precisely because of her youth and vulnerability”.

Zafar Iqbal
Tariq Islam
Amir Zaman
Nasir Sultan

“The offences involved an appalling breach of trust – the victim was groomed and plied with cigarettes, alcohol and drugs to make her compliant. The defendants then showed a complete lack of remorse for their actions, with ten of them claiming throughout the contested trial that the allegations were fabricated, or that they believed the victim to be over 16.”

Middlesborough

Five girls groomed on the streets of a North-East town are still being “tortured” by supporters of the men who abused them, their families said tonight. The mother of one of the teenage victims spoke out after two men and a 17-year-old youth were jailed for a total of 19 years for sexually exploiting the girls in Middlesbrough. Passing sentence, Judge John Walford told Shakil Munir, 32, 19-year-old Sakib Ahmed and Ateeq Latif, 17, that they had regarded the girls — all aged between 13 and 15 — as objects for their own sexual pleasure.

The court heard that the girls had been taunted and insulted by friends and family of the defendants since coming forward, including being bombarded by obscene messages, called sluts and accused of being racist. Judge Walford described the girls' treatment as “appalling”, adding that it revealed a “profoundly worrying attitude about the offending”. Speaking outside court after the sentencing, the mother of one of the victims said: “The girls are still being tortured by these people — they are painting them as sluts when they are the victims.”.

Judge John Walford told the three: "It is quite clear from all the evidence that you regarded these girls between the ages of 13 and 15 as objects for your sexual pleasure. "In reality they were children who lacked the maturity or experience to cope with your manipulative ways." The court heard how the girls were massively affected by the sexual crimes, and were subjected to a "horrifying" amount of pressure and abuse. They were called names like "white trash", goaded at school and bombarded by abusive messages on Facebook.

Peterborough

The Peterborough sex abuse case involved 10 men who committed sexual offences against under-aged girls, some as young as 12, in the English city of Peterborough, Cambridgeshire. In a series of trials in 2014 and 2015, they were found guilty of rape, child prostitution and trafficking for sexual exploitation.

The victims were of Czech, Slovak and English origin and typically vulnerable girls, some in local authority care, who were groomed with gifts of tobacco, free meals and apparent displays of affection and friendship by the older males who were targeting them. They were then persuaded to drink vodka or other strong alcoholic drinks and coerced into sexual acts. Some were subsequently trafficked as child prostitutes.

The man whose activity prompted the police operation, Mohammed Khubaib, a 43-year-old restaurant-owner of Pakistani heritage, was described during his trial at the Old Bailey as having a “'persistent and almost predatory interest' in teenage girls”. Khubaib also owned a lettings agency and took under-aged girls to flats under his control, where he and his friends would give them alcohol and play them sexually explicit music videos as part of the sexual grooming.

The gang congregated at a fried chicken takeaway
One of the victims was tied up and raped by a number of men in a playhouse

“The abusers called themselves the Peterborough Mally Gang, they befriended vulnerable girls, gave them gifts, money, drugs and alcohol and used violence and intimidation to control them, subjecting them to "appalling" abuse in places such as children's playgrounds.”.

One of Khubaib's victims said in a victim impact statement: “It was disgusting what he did to me. Before that happened, I was a typical 13-year-old who didn't know any better and thought that Mohammed was my friend who I had under my thumb. Now I know that he was the one with the control.”.

Aylesbury

The Aylesbury child sex abuse ring was a group of five men who committed serious sexual offences against two under-aged girls in the English town of Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. In July 2015, they were found guilty of offences including rape and child prostitution over a period extending from 2006 to 2012. The child protection charity Barnardo's stated that it had worked with the two girls in 2008 and referred one of them to Buckinghamshire County Council as in danger of child sex exploitation. The council did not respond adequately and, following the convictions, apologized to the two girls for its failure to protect them. It has now instituted a Serious Case Review to examine those failures.

Those investigated, prosecuted (all of them Asian) are…

The gang used gifts of food, alcohol, drugs and DVDs to win the girls' trust before initiating abusive sexual relationships. The girls, referred to in court as Girl A and Girl B, were subsequently trafficked as child prostitutes in Aylesbury. One girl gave evidence that she had had sex with 60 men, almost all of Asian heritage, when she was only 12 or 13, having been “conditioned to think it was normal behaviour”. Sex took place in various locations in Aylesbury, including the girls' own homes. The men were friends living in the area, some married with children, some working in the market and some as taxi drivers.

Vikram Singh, 45, of Cannock Road, Aylesbury.
Asif Hussain, 33, of Hodge Lea, Milton Keynes.
Arshad Jani, 33, of Cousins Drive, Aylesbury.
Mohammed Imran, 38, of Springcliffe Street, Bradford.
Akbari Khan, 36, of Mandeville Road, Aylesbury.
Taimoor Khan, 29, of Highbridge Road, Aylesbury.

Following conviction in July 2015, the men were sentenced in September to jail terms ranging from three to nineteen-and-a-half years totalling 82 years and six months. Judge John Bevan QC said that “for the price of a McDonald's, a milkshake and cinema ticket”, Girl A was sexually exploited by “stallholders in Aylesbury market, taxi, and bus drivers”. He said he could not explain why the criminals “focused their attention on white under-age girls”, but believed their “vulnerability” played a major role.

“It is without doubt that if social services had done more to protect the victims and spotted the crucial signs that something was wrong, we wouldn’t be here today.”.

Alan Collins, Hugh James Solicitors

He said that if the criminals had targeted “Asian under-age girls, they would have paid a heavy price in their community.” Girl A herself made a statement speaking of the effects of her exploitation by up to 60 Asian men, describing her feelings of “worthlessness” and her battles with depression and alcohol addiction. She added that she felt that her “teenage years were taken away”. In her statement, Girl B said that the sentences were “academic” because “no sentence could ever put right what happened”.

Chelmsford

Pizza takeaway staff groomed a 13-year-old girl with free food and got her hooked on cocaine before selling her to other men for sex. Mohammad Rostami, 37, lure the teenager into beginning a sexual relationship with him after they met in a pizza shop in Chelmsford, Essex, before farming her out to other abusers. After his interest in her fizzled out, she was exploited by Mehdi Zare, 32, who arranged for her to have sex with others in return for drugs and money.

Mohammad Rostami.
Mehdi Zare.
Amin Kaveh.

Their crimes came to light after the victim, now a young woman, contacted Essex Police in April 2014 to report she had been abused when she was 13 or 14. After seeing her abusers jailed she told how they had left her feeling "dirty and disgusting" and said she now struggled to trust people.

Speaking after the case concluded, the brave victim said: "I finally feel free. I have spent the last few years thinking they wouldn't pay for what they have done to me and others. I never thought anyone would believe me. I now feel a huge weight has been finally lifted from my shoulders. What happened has affected me in so many ways, not just physically but mentally and emotionally too. I have been on self-destruct mode most of my life.

The squalid room above CM Pizza, where two of the men worked, where the girl was abused.
Police found Rostami had been supplying methadrone, the amount ceased had a street value of around £10,000.
CM Pizza in Chelmsford, now closed, where the men worked when they targeted the girls.

I felt dirty and disgusting, like I did something wrong, and still do. I have lost friends and I nearly lost my relationship with my family. I lost relationships as I found it hard to trust not just men but anyone. But I am learning day by day that I can't let them beat me. I have now moved away and started afresh and am just getting on with my life the best I can, with the love and support from my amazing boyfriend and my family".

High Wycombe

Three men involved in an Asian child sex gang who preyed on a schoolgirl they had drugged with cannabis and heroin, started jail terms on Saturday after being convicted of crimes carried out in High Wycombe, Aylesbury and Wendover, years previously. A judge jailed them for up to 19 years after hearing a heart-rending victim impact statement from the victim who is now a 32-year-old who suffers from alcohol addiction and depression. The jury had convicted one man of grooming and two other men of raping and giving heroin to a girl in her teenage years. They were each sentenced to serve up to 19 years in prison.

Mohammad Aslam
Berkley John
Saeed Ahmed

The now adult child, who the court heard was “desperate for love” after being alienated from her family, was introduced to hard drugs and convinced to have sex with strangers in High Wycombe, Wendover and Aylesbury, as payment. Over the course of one year or more, a taxi driver would pick the 15-year-old girl up at her school and take her to a rented flat, where her body would be sold to up to eight adult men almost every night. When she approached the police in fear that her life was in danger, she was turned away and told she “needed more evidence” and said she felt like officers were asking her to be sexually assaulted again to get proof.

Judge Johanna Cutts, sitting at Reading Crown Court, heard that the girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was first introduced to the perpetrators at the early age of 13 years, when taxi driver Berkley John picked her up and preyed on her vulnerability. The court was told that defendant John, from Aylesbury, who was aged in his late 50s at the time and was a stranger to the victim, told her he loved her and said he wanted to marry her when she turned 16.

He then took her to his friend Saeed Ahmed’s flat in Aylesbury where they introduced her to cannabis and, as she became addicted over time, John started making her perform oral sex on him as payment. The abuse became more serious when John started giving her heroin and forced her to have sex with him and others in Ahmed’s flat. While Ahmed, aged 51, was aware of the purpose for which his flat was being used, he did not partake in the sexual activities, the court heard.

Chesham

Four men from south Buckinghamshire have been found guilty of sexually abusing a vulnerable schoolgirl over an eight-month period. Nazakat Mahmood, Ghulfaraz Nawaz, Haroon Rauf and Omar Sharif were convicted of committing a string of sexual offences against the girl between December 2011 and July 2012.

Haroon Rauf
Nazakat Mahmood
Ghulfaraz Nawaz
Omar Sharif

She was just 14 years old at the time of the abuse. Mahmood, Nawaz and Rauf forced the girl, who was often plied with alcohol, to perform sex acts on them and pressured her into having full sex on several occasions in the Chesham area, Reading Crown Court heard.

After the trio were arrested, Sharif blackmailed her into having sex with him — including in her pyjamas in a graveyard in the middle of the night, jurors were told. Prosecutors said all the men had denied having any sexual activity with the girl or inciting it, and they believed she was at least 17 years old. Yet jurors were told all of the men, then aged in their 20s, had known how young their victim really was. On Tuesday, jurors returned guilty verdicts on 20 counts against the four men to bring an end to the three-week trial.

Oxford

The Oxford child sex abuse ring was a group of 22 men who were convicted of various sexual offences against underage girls in the English city of Oxford between 1998 and 2012. Thames Valley Police launched Operation Bullfinch in May 2011 to investigate allegations of historical sexual abuse, leading to ten men being convicted. Upon further allegations in 2015, Thames Valley Police then launched Operation Silk, resulting in ten more different men being convicted and Operation Spur which resulted in two more convictions.

In March 2015, a report revealed that more than 300 children, mostly girls from the city of Oxford, could have been groomed and sexually exploited in the area. It accused the Thames Valley Police, then led by Chief Constable Sara Thornton, of disbelieving the girls and failing to act on repeated calls for help, and Oxfordshire Social Services of failing to protect them despite compelling evidence they were in danger. The report also called for research into why a significant number of perpetrators of child grooming are of “Pakistani and/or Muslim heritage”.

The first seven men included two pairs of brothers with three other men in June 2013. One of the gang was further convicted in June 2014 along with two other men. Three of the men were further convicted in another trial in January 2019 under another operation named Operation Silk. There were two further groups of men convicted under Operation Silk, eight men in June 2018 and a further two men in February 2020, along with a man who was further convicted. A man was convicted in March 2015 and two cousins convicted in July 2016.

Police Interview of Bilal Ahmed.

From 2004 to 2012, the men groomed children from 11-15 years-old from dysfunctional backgrounds who were unlikely to be believed by others living in care homes. They were given presents, plied with alcohol, and introduced to crack cocaine and heroin. After the girls became dependent on the men, they were guarded, so they could not escape and threatened that they and their families would be harmed if they tried to leave. The girls were raped vaginally, orally, and anally, sometimes by several men, the abuse occasionally lasting for several days at a time.

“For nearly a year detectives have been receiving reports of girls disappearing, some as young as 13, only to return days later, refusing to tell anyone where they had been. Sometimes they would be bruised, bleeding and half-naked”.

Some girls were groomed to be prostitutes and taken to guest houses in Bradford, Leeds, London, Slough, and Bournemouth where men paid to have sex with them. The girls were subjected to extreme sexual violence, biting, suffocating, and burning. They were tortured with knives, baseball bats, and meat cleavers and were occasionally urinated upon. One 14-year-old girl was burned with a lighter when she tried to resist having sex. The mother of another girl said that “she had begged social services staff to rescue her [daughter] from the gang”, who had “threatened to cut the girl's face off” and “slit the throats” of members of the girl's family. One girl aged 12 was forced into prostitution. She was abused in various places around Oxford, including a flat, the Nanford Guest House, Travelodge and in Shotover Woods. She frequently contracted chlamydia and was covered in burns from where men had stubbed out their cigarettes. She began to self-harm and described her experiences as “living hell”.

“The scale of the abuse was not reflected in the cases that came to court — a serious case review published in 2015 found as many as 373 children, including 50 boys, might have been targeted in Oxfordshire over a 16-year period.”.

She said that the men sometimes seemed to be aroused by her crying.[ Mohammed Karrar, the ringleader of the gang, was “brazen in his exploitation”. According to the Guardian, he “acted in the belief that the authorities would never challenge him—something that for years proved to be true.” He branded the buttocks of one under-aged victim with his initial, “M”, marking her as his property, and charged men between £400 and £600 to have sex with her. Karrar visited the girl at her house, where she was a carer for her deaf and ill parents. He performed an illegal abortion on the same girl. He regularly had sex with her when she was the age of 12. His brother had a parallel relationship with her, although she did not see him as often. Before she reached her teens, she was pregnant.

Police Interview of Mustafa Ahmed.

When Mohammed Karrar found out, he was “fucking fuming” with her for allowing it to happen and told her, “You should have been more responsible.” He went into a rage and grabbed her by the throat. Soon after, he gave her drugs and took her to Reading, where a backstreet abortion was performed with a hooked instrument. A 14-year-old girl was threatened with a gun into having sex with a member of the sex ring. She said the gang members were aware she lived in a children's home and that Akhtar Dogar, a gang member, waited around the corner from the children's home in Henley-on-Thames where she lived. She described being transported around flats, guest houses and parks where she was then raped.

One of the premises used by the gang to abuse girls was the Nanford Guest House in Oxford

The Daily Telegraph reported Dr Taj Hargey, imam of the Oxford Islamic Congregation, as saying that “race and religion were inextricably linked to the recent spate of grooming rings in which Muslim men have targeted under-age white girls”:

“The view of some Islamic preachers towards white women can be appalling. They encourage their followers to believe that these women are habitually promiscuous, decadent, and sleazy—sins which are made all the worse by the fact that they are kaffurs or non-believers. Their dress code, from miniskirts to sleeveless tops, is deemed to reflect their impure and immoral outlook. According to this mentality, these white women deserve to be punished for their behaviour by being exploited and degraded.”.

Hargey blames the agencies of the state, including the police, social services and the care system, who seemed eager to ignore the sickening exploitation that was happening before their eyes. Terrified of accusations of racism, desperate not to undermine the official creed of cultural diversity, they took no action against obvious abuse

22/2/2024