An ‘Asian’ male has been sentenced to prison after being convicted for raping a 13-year-old girl, becoming the 35th grooming gang member to be imprisoned in the scope of a large-scale investigation conducted by police in Huddersfield, England.
Manzoor Akhtar, 31, was sentenced to four years and six months in prison after being found guilty by Leeds Crown Court on April 22nd of raping a young girl between 2005 and 2006.
“Akhtar richly deserves the prison sentence he has been given after being found guilty and convicted for the dreadful sexual abuse of this young victim,” said Detective Chief Inspector Richard McNamara of the Kirklees District CID.
“He thought nothing of this girl’s obvious very young age as he raped her and treated her in a fashion which can only be described as callous in the extreme,” McNamara added.
Another man, Shaqeel Hussain, 36, who was sentenced to eight years in prison in February for raping a 14-year-old girl, also pleaded guilty to the indecent assault of a 16-year-old girl. Hussain will now serve an additional year behind bars, consecutive to the initial eight-year sentence.
It is likely that the two men will not spend their entire terms in prison, however, as it is commonplace within the English criminal justice system for the vast majority of criminals to be released on licence automatically halfway through their sentence — meaning that Akhtar could be out in just two years and Hussain out in four.
The two convictions mean that 35 men have now been imprisoned as a result of West Yorkshire Police’s multi-part Operation Tendersea, which investigated sexual abuse committed against young girls in Huddersfield between 1995 and 2011.
The true scale of the grooming gang epidemic in the United Kingdom has long been hidden from public view by police forces fearing the appearance of racism should they pursue “Asian” grooming gangs.
In January, Rotherham police were revealed to have overlooked decades of abuse committed by members of “Asian” rape gangs for fear of sparking racial tensions in the area.
The report from the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) said that a Rotherham chief inspector told a father of a missing girl that the city “would erupt” should the public be informed that “Asian” grooming gangs were sexually abusing young white girls.
In 2017, the counter-extremism think tank Quilliam found that 84 per cent of the people convicted of grooming gang crimes in Britain were Muslim men of South Asian heritage.
The study found that the men systematically went after white girls as they were seen as “easy targets” compared to girls from their own communities, whom they felt should be “protected”.
The British Sikh and Hindu communities, which have also been ravaged by grooming gang abuse, have criticized the media for consistently referring to members of grooming gangs as “Asian”.
The Network of Sikh Organisations (NSO) said that the term — which in the UK typically refers to people from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh — unjustly includes members of the Hindu and Sikh communities as part of the grooming gang epidemic, which in reality is mostly comprised of Muslim men from Pakistan.
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