Former Labour peer Lord Ahmed of Rotherham has been found guilty of a count of buggery against a boy under 11 and attempting to rape a young girl twice in the 1970s.
Pakistani-born Nazir Ahmed, 64, who was elevated to the House of Lords by then-Prime Minister Blair in 1998, has been found guilty of what has been characterised as “repeated sexual abuse” of young children when he was a teen.
Lord Ahmed’s two older brothers Mohammed Farouq, 71, and Mohammed Tariq, 65, faced charges related to the same male victim — who was under the age of 11 at the time — but both were deemed unfit to stand trial.
However the jury did find that they committed the heinous acts alleged in the case, the BBC reports.
During the trial, prosecutor Tom Little QC told the court: “This is about repeated sexual abuse that took place in Rotherham over a number of years.
“Those involved kept it buried away for many years. It is no longer buried away and no longer kept quiet as they have complained.”
Little went on to tell jurors that the sexual abuse committed by Lord Ahmed was “not a single incident,” explaining: “It was not isolated and it was not innocent sexual experimentation by children. It was abuse, repeated abuse, plain and simple.”
The prosecutor went on to praise the female victim who came forward to authorities for having “the courage to go to the police to make a complaint against a standing member of the House of Lords.”
Lord Ahmed moved to the United Kingdom at the age of 12 with his family from their native Pakistan in 1969 to come to live with his father, who, at the time, was employed as a steelworker in the northern English town of Rotherham. The town would later become infamous for being one of the primary hotbeds of grooming gang sexual exploitation of children.
In 1975, the Pakistani migrant joined the left-wing Labour Party and was elected in 1990 to the Rotherham council. He would then go on to become the chairman of the South Yorkshire Labour Party in 1993.
After an attempt to get elected to the House of Commons, Ahmed was elevated to the House of Lords in 1998 by then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, becoming one of the nation’s first Muslim peers.
In 2013, he was suspended from the Labour Party after being accused of anti-Semitism for a television appearance in which he alleged a Jewish conspiracy was behind his 2009 imprisonment for dangerous driving in connection with a fatal car crash. Lord Ahmed ultimately resigned from the party just two days before he was expected to be expelled.
In November of 2020, he would go on to resign from the House of Lords after the Lords Conduct Committee found that Lord Ahmed had sexually exploited a woman, Tahira Zaman, and was therefore set to be expelled regardless.
The former Labour peer denied all charges of child sexual abuse and previously told police that there was “an agenda behind the complaints” brought against him in the trial.
The presiding judge in the case, Mr Justice Lavender, will sentence Ahmed later.
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