Convicted grooming gang child rapist Ajaz Ahmed has been sentenced to 28 years in prison for child rape and a multitude of other child sex offences, including organising gang rapes of young girls in Rochdale.
Ajaz Ahmed, 56, a former cafe owner, was found guilty in December by the Minshull Street Crown Court in Manchester of 23 offences, including ten counts of rape, seven counts of penetrative sexual activity with a child, actual bodily harm, non-penetrative sexual activity with a child, two counts of assault by penetration, possessing of an indecent image of a child, and extreme pornography.
This week, he was sentenced to 28 years in prison, the Greater Manchester Police said. However, due to Britain’s lax criminal justice system, he will likely be freed after serving half that behind bars.
Ahmed, whose heritage was not revealed by police, was discovered during Operation Lytton, which sought to uncover historical grooming offences in Rochdale, one of the hotspots in northern England for mainly Pakistani-heritage child rape gangs.
In 2016, one of Ahmed’s victims told police that at the age of 13, she had been raped by several men at a flat in Rochdale in a building that he owned. Another victim, aged 15 at the start of the abuse, said that over the course of several years, she was subjected to a “horrific and sustained period of control and physical and sexual abuse,” including rape.
Several other women came forward to claim that he sexually abused and raped them while they were teenagers. The police found that he used his flat and cafe as a means of luring the girls, on multiple occasions offering shelter to vulnerable and homeless teens before sexually abusing them.
In his police mugshot photo, Ahmed was pictured with a broad smile.
Commenting on the case, Detective Constable Ann Cooper Poole said: “It took just one brave survivor to come forward, speak to our officers and detail her abuse, and it opened up an entire case which resulted in us obtaining evidence that Ahmed was a callous and prolific sex offender.
“These girls had their childhoods and teen years tainted in the most abhorrent way, and they experienced what no one should ever experience. I want to commend their bravery for coming forward and speaking to us. They played a vital role in reaching today’s outcome; ensuring justice is reached and that this man is put behind bars, unable to cause any further harm to the community.”
DC Cooper Poole urged other survivors of grooming gangs to come forward to the police, saying that “it is never too late to seek justice.”
Despite a plurality of the British public believing that there were institutional efforts to cover up the scale of mostly Pakistani-heritage grooming gangs preying on often young white girls in England, the left-wing Labour government of Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer has rejected calls for a public inquiry into the matter.
Starmer argued that the government should focus on implementing recommendations of previous reports while castigating those demanding a full inquiry as jumping on the “bandwagon of the far-right“. Previous reports have found that local authorities, including police, overlooked sex crimes being committed by minority groups for fear of appearing racist or stoking ethnic divisions.
One report commissioned by the mayor of Greater Manchester found that in the early 2000s, police overlooked a grooming gang of around 97 “South Asian” men who had abused at least 57 young girls as officers were told to look for offenders of “other ethnicities” over politically correct concerns.