Five rape pregang dators may have their “unduly lenient” sentences for the abuse of a girl in Keighley, West Yorkshire increased by the Court of Appeal.
35-year-old Amjad Hussain now joins fellow rape gang members Baber Hussain, 36, Hassan Basharat, 32, Imran Sabir, 42, and Omar Safdar, 30, in being referred to the Court of Appeal by the Attorney-General’s Office for a possible increase in his prison term under the Unduly Lenient Sentence (ULS) scheme, local media reports.
Anyone in Britain can ask the Attorney-General, currently Suella Braverman MP, to refer serious convicts in England to the Court of Appeal under the scheme, if they think their sentence was unduly lenient.
Hussain was sentenced to just 12 years for two counts of rape and another offence relating to “multiple incident rapes”, and will be eligible for release after serving just two-thirds of his term at present.
Baber Hussain was sentenced to a just barely lengthier 13 years despite being convicted of seven counts of rape.
Basharat and Sabir each received 12 years for a count of rape and a count of conspiring to rape together, while Safdar received 12 years for three counts of rape, including an incident in the victim’s home that took place despite her telling him to stay away.
Like Amjad Hussain, all will be eligible for release after serving only part of their sentences, like all prisoners handed non-“life” sentences in the United Kingdom.
The public has often been surprised to learn that predators sentenced to seemingly lengthy sentences after the authorities finally began tackling the issue of mostly Muslim, South Asian heritage “grooming gangs” preying on girls and young women — long ignored because police, social services, and local government officials feared “rocking the multicultural boat” — were back on the streets after a fairly short time.
Ahdel ‘Eddie’ Ali, ringleader of a gang which targeted around 100 girls, is a particularly egregious example, having been released just eight years into what was reported as a 26-year term for offences including rape and child prostitution.
These seemingly tough terms are arrived at by adding up multiple terms that are to be served concurrently — i.e. at the same time, so all but the longest one are effectively meaningless — and failing to take into account eligibility for early release on licence, which is generally automatic.
The public are also often misled on rape gang sentences by the mainstream media’s habit of reporting that convicts have been sentenced to “a total of” some impressive amount of years, measured in multiple decades or over a century — despite the fact no individual member of the group will be off the streets for very long.
Indeed, some rape gang victims now report having bumped into their already-freed abusers in public; even ones who were supposed to be deported years ago.