Three Pakistani men convicted in the Rochdale child grooming scandal are free on the streets of the city, despite losing their legal right to remain in the country two years ago.
Qari Abdul Rauf, Abdul Aziz and Adil Khan were convicted in 2012 on a series of charges relating to the sexual abuse of children as young as 12. The men were all released after early from prison, with all just serving four years or less behind bars.
The three rapists held dual citizenship in Pakistan and the United Kingdom and faced deportation to Pakistan after the government announced that it would be revoking their British citizenship.
In 2016, then-home secretary Theresa May ruled it would be ‘conducive to the public good’ to revoke their right to remain in the country. The group mounted a tax-payer funded challenge to the ruling, claiming that the decision had violated their human rights. The appeal was rejected in July of 2018.
Despite this, there are no indications that any deportation proceedings are taking place against the three men, leaving them free to roam the same streets of Rochdale, where they abused young girls.
A victim of Qari Abdul Rauf, told The Mirror, that she had seen images of him on social media in Rochdale, saying: “I thought Theresa May had organised his deportation, so how come he’s still here?”
“I feel violated to know he’s living near me – in the same area where he hunted for girls like me,” she said, adding: “It’s a total betrayal of grooming victims that he’s allowed to stay.”
Rauf, a taxi driver and former teacher at a mosque, used his taxi to drive his 15-year-old victim into deserted areas of the city to have sex with her. He was released from prison after serving just two years and six months of his six-year prison sentence.
Boris Johnson’s government has so far refused to release a long-promised report on the ethnic backgrounds of convicted grooming gang members, even after over 120,000 people signed a petition demanding the paper be made public.
Calling on the government to release the findings of the report, Tom Hunt MP said: “This is a live issue and represents a form of evil that needs to be stamped out fully.”
“Bearing in mind the seriousness of this issue it’s only right and proper than any Government review on the issue is robust and no holds barred, and is published fully with no redactions so the public at large can gain an understanding of what happened and how it was allowed to happen,” Hunt added.
A 2017 report conducted by Quilliam, a London based counter-extremism think tank, found that 84 per cent of the people convicted of grooming gang crimes in Britain were Muslim men of South Asian heritage.
The study, which was authored by two Pakistani-heritage men, found that the grooming gangs would specifically target young white girls because they were seen as “easy targets” compared to girls from their own communities, whom they felt should be “protected”.
“We began thinking we would debunk the media narrative that Asians are overrepresented in this specific crime,” said author Muna Adil.
“But, when the final numbers came in we were alarmed and dismayed. For both of us being of Pakistani heritage, this issue is deeply personal and deeply disturbing,” Adil remarked.
Police throughout the country have been accused of covering up the true scale of the grooming gang epidemic, as well as its racial component.
A report commissioned by the Mayor of Greater Manchester found that police in the city systematically overlooked crimes being committed Asian grooming gangs, out of fear of being a labelled racist.
“What had a massive input was the offending target group were predominantly Asian males and we were told to try and get other ethnicities,” said an unnamed GMP detective constable.
The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) found that police in Rotherham had also consistently ignored the sexual violence committed by Asian grooming gangs for fear of sparking “racial tensions“.
The IOPC report claimed that a chief inspector in Rotherham had told a father of a missing girl that the town “would erupt” if the public were made aware that the gangs were targeting young white girls.
Follow Kurt on Twitter at @KurtZindulka
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