Members of an infamous rape gang have reportedly been given over £2 million in taxpayer funded legal aid, including two who were set to be deported from Britain years ago.
The nine Rochdale grooming abusers have so far received £2,025,363 in legal aid and this bill is set to increase as at least two of the groomers, Qari Abdul Rauf and Adil Khan, are to launch new appeals against deportation to their native Pakistan, according to a report from the Sun on Sunday.
Adil Khan and Qari Abdul Rauf were convicted in 2012 on a slew of charges related to the sexual abuse of children as young as 12, yet were both released early — Khan in 2016 and Rauf in 2014, after serving just over two years behind bars.
In 2015, then-Home Secretary Theresa May decided that the convicted sexual predators should lose their British citizenship because of the heinous nature of their crimes and the fact that they still held Pakistani citizenship, ruling that it would be “conducive to the public good” to revoke their right to remain in the country.
The predators launched a taxpayer-funded legal challenge to the decision, claiming that stripping them of their British citizenship would violate their human rights.
Though the appeal was ultimately rejected in 2018, the government has so far failed to deport the abusers, leaving them free to roam the same streets where they once preyed on young girls and even come into contact with their victims.
Khan and Rauf are both expected to launch another legal bid to skirt their deportation to Pakistan next month.
Responding to the report that the Rochdale rapists have raked in over £2 million in legal aid, David Spencer, of the Centre for Crime Prevention, said: “The legal aid system was not designed to let convicted criminals run up huge taxpayer-funded bills to exhaust every possible avenue to dodge justice and avoid deportation.”
But the Legal Aid Agency defended the funding, claiming: “These criminals did not receive a penny. It went to lawyers so they faced justice.”
Home Secretary Priti Patel has consistently pledged to reform the United Kingdom’s “broken” immigration system, however she has in fact overseen a dramatic decrease in the deportations of foreign criminals as well as record numbers of illegal migrants entering the country by boat from France.
One of Patel’s proposed reforms is said to include prohibiting asylum seekers from launching “spurious legal challenges” at the High Court in the hopes of speeding up deportations.
One of Khan’s victims, who was impregnated by him when she was just 13-years-old, said last month: “The fact they are appealing their sentences honestly makes me feel sick.”
“I have to live round here and it’s so easy to find me if they want to,” she said, adding: “We are nearly ten years on and me and the other victims are still being let down by the police and the legal system. No one seems to care.”
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
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