FINALLY the verdicts came — guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty . . . on
and on, ringing over and over again inside Sheffield Crown Court.
And as the jury read them out, the victims in the public gallery held hands to
support each other, their decades-long ordeal finally coming to a close.
For some of them, the news that the depraved Rotherham gang that raped them,
tortured them and forced them into prostitution were to be caged came nearly
30 years after the abuse began.
Only one man met the news with chilling indifference.
Ringleader Arshid Hussain, the monster known as “Mad Ash” who led his two
brothers, in a 16-year-long campaign of abuse, appeared to be asleep on his
video link to Wednesday’s proceedings.
In a final insult to his victims, he had refused to attend the trial’s final
stages, claiming he was too unwell and would watch from his bed at home
instead, nursed by his wife.
With the brothers’ conviction, along with that of their uncle and several
other gang members, this outfit’s 15 victims can finally begin to rebuild
their lives.
But serious questions still remain.
Why did the authorities, who knew of the scandal, not take action to stop it?
Are bent cops who assisted the brothers still on the beat today?
And would any action have been taken if not for a crusading press calling
attention to the scandal?
Rotherham’s police commander, Chief Superintendent Jason Harwin, admitted his
force could have acted earlier as he apologised to the girls who appeared
during the trial.
But evidence thrown up by the hearing suggests serious police corruption and
collusion with the gangs.
And it is still unclear how many of Rotherham’s other 2,000 groomed girls will
ever get justice.
The Hussain brothers will face lengthy jail terms when they are sentenced
today.
Rotherham youth worker Adele Gladman said: “I don’t think I have ever
encountered the levels of sadism and torture and sheer cruelty that we were
encountering against children.”
Arshid, 40, was found guilty of 23 counts of rape and indecent assault as well
as false imprisonment and abduction.
Arshid’s brother Basharat, 39 — known as Bash — was found guilty of all of the
15 counts he faced, including of indecent assault, indecency with a child
and threatening to kill a brother of one of his victims.
Third brother Bannaras, 36, — known as Bono — pleaded guilty to ten offences
before the trial started, admitting a string of rapes and indecent assaults
against seven girls.
Their uncle Qurban Ali, 53, was also found guilty of conspiracy to rape.
Over the course of the three-month trial, 18 women — three of whom were not
included in the charges — told how between 1987 and 2003 they had been
groomed as teenagers before being dragged into a nightmare of sexual abuse.
Many of the girls were chosen because they had previously been abused, were in
local authority care or had unsettled home lives, making them “easy
targets”.
One was just 11 when she became the latest to be won over with sweets, mobile
phones and perfume, before being told to repay the brothers with sexual
favours. Later, hard drugs were used as bait.
Once the gang had their claws into the teens, they demanded sex more and more
often, trafficking the girls for others to use and even pimping them out to
other abusers as payments for debts.
Flats, houses and garages around Rotherham and the surrounding area became the
setting for horrific acts of abuse with scores of men, mostly of of
Pakistani origin, invited to take part.
One young girl was locked in a room above a Blackpool restaurant for weeks,
forced to have sex with man after man. Another told how she was just 13 when
Arshid took her to a flat above a shop in Sheffield and had sex with her.
When he had finished, a group of five older Asian men entered the room and
began to climb on top of her. On that occasion she managed to escape.
A 12-year-old was picked up from a children’s home and bought a meal before
being forced into sexual acts by a group of men in a car.
She said: “I was in a car on my own. I was a 12-year-old girl. I just thought
it is what I had to do.” The court heard how one girl was taken around the
country and forced to perform sexual acts up to three times a day on
different men.
She eventually became one of two girls to become pregnant, aged just 14. In
total, five victims became pregnant. Two of them gave birth. When the girls
stepped out of line, punishments were brutal. One had cigarettes stubbed out
on her body while another was blindfolded and had petrol poured on her feet.
Another told how she suffered “years of physical and mental cruelty”, after
Basharat began abusing her at age 15. At one point he told her he would
force her to dig her own grave.
When one attempted to escape, Basharat threatened to kill her brother, saying
he had access to police so would always be able to find her. The brothers
will be sentenced alongside two other offenders who helped them carry out
their crimes.
The gang were helped to recruit victims by Karen MacGregor, 59, who visited
children’s homes and invited troubled young girls to live with her.
MacGregor made the youngsters think of her as a “second mother”.
But in a sickening betrayal of their trust, after the girls had settled in to
their new life she told them they needed to start “earning their keep”.
They were then plied with vodka and forced to have sex with older Pakistani
men, with the prosecution describing the house as being frequented by a
string of Asian men.
MacGregor and another woman, Shelley Davies, 40, were found guilty of
conspiracy to procure prostitutes and false imprisonment. But after the
verdicts David Greenwood, head of child abuse claims at law firm Switalskis
Solicitors, which represented six of the girls at the trial, said: “Far from
being the end, this is really just the beginning.
“There were lots of groups of men operating in Rotherham who are being
investigated and this is just the start of a series of trials.”
Victims told the court their abusers had such a grip on local cops and
politicians that they were said to “own” Rotherham.
The court heard that among those who had sex with underage girls was a police
officer, who also passed drugs to the sex-grooming gang and told them when
authorities were searching for missing youngsters.
That officer is now under investigation by his own force and by the
Independent Police Complaints Commission.
Fellow cop PC Hassan Ali allegedly helped to arrange a deal where one of the
gangsters handed over an abused girl to authorities at a petrol station,
after receiving a promise that they would not be arrested.
PC Ali, 44, died in February last year, killed in a traffic accident on the
day he was told he was under investigation.
These two officers were said in court to have accessed police intelligence
databases nine times between 2006 and 2011, checking what information was
stored about the Hussain brothers.
In total there have been more than 190 allegations made against 92
identified and 102 unidentified officers.
The IPCC is conducting 55 investigations into alleged police misconduct linked
to Rotherham child sex crimes.
Former deputy leader of Rotherham Council Jahangir Akhtar, also said to have
been involved in the petrol station handover, faces questions about his role
in the scandal his council failed to prevent.
Now suspended from the Labour party, Akhtar, a relative of the Hussain
brothers, was described by Louise Casey’s report into Rotherham Council in
February 2015 as a “powerful figure” claimed to have “influence that
extended to the police”.
The care system has also come under intense scrutiny.
The court heard that one victim’s care home took no action even after she
returned shaken or bloodied from abusive encounters with men.
The jury also heard that no action was taken despite the discovery of three
men in a girl’s room in her care home.
READ MORE:
Six
guilty over Rotherham child sex grooming ring who preyed on girls as young
as 11
Rotherham:
Five more guilty of sex offences
And questions remain over why action was not taken against the Hussain
brothers much sooner.
In 2013 it was revealed that police and social workers had intelligence that
Arshid was among a group sexually abusing more than 40 girls. Despite this,
the abuse continued.
And leaked documents in 2012 revealed that the authorities knew that Rotherham
girls were being abused and trafficked around the country for more than a
decade
One report later found that the lack of action was down to the fact that most
of the abuse was carried out by men of Pakistani heritage, meaning
discussing the topic was “taboo” among councillors and council staff, who
feared being “thought racist”.
With the authorities unwilling to take action, without the press shining a
light on to the hidden world the abuses could still be carrying on.
A probe by Times journalist Andrew Norfolk drew the world’s attention to the
scandal in 2013, telling the story of Jessica, one of the children abused by
Arshid when she was just 14.
In a series of award-winning articles for The Times — owned by the company
that owns The Sun — Norfolk repeatedly highlighted the problem. It
eventually resulted in Professor Alexis Jay’s inquiry into sexual
exploitation in the town.
While Jay’s probe found in August 2014 that 1,400 girls in Rotherham were
groomed and abused between 1997 and 2013, other estimates have put the
figure as high as 2,000.
Now it remains to be seen how many of those victims will see justice.
‘What these men did to me was pure evil’
MUM-of-two Jessica, 30 (not her real name) was 14 when she was first abused
by the gang. She said yesterday:
“After hearing the guilty verdicts I feel I finally have closure on the abuse
I suffered.
What Arshid and his gang did was pure evil, that’s the only way to describe
it. He destroyed my life, he destroyed my family’s life and he destroyed the
lives of many, many other young girls.
I’m now 30 and it feels like my life will only really have started when he is
sentenced.
He deserves to be jailed for ever, to make sure he’s kept away from anyone
else he might hurt. But this trial is just the start of it. There are
thousands more victims like me, young girls who were abused in Rotherham and
other towns.
We need to be encouraging them to speak out against the people who abused
them, show them that they will be believed, that the police will take
action. The police tell me that even following this trial, they’ve seen more
people coming forward to talk about what happened to them.
And the professionals who should have been looking after us, who watched it
all happen and did nothing – they need to be held to account too.”
Arshid ‘Mad Ash’ Hussain
GUILTY OF: One rape, one count of conspiracy to rape; 11
indecent assaults; two counts of procuring a woman under 21 to become a
common prostitute; two counts of aiding and abetting rape; and one count
each of procuring a girl under 21 to have unlawful sex with another; false
imprisonment; attempting to procure a girl under 21 to have unlawful sexual
intercourse; abduction; ABH and aiding and abetting another serious sexual
assault.
Basharat ‘Bash’ Hussain
GUILTY OF: One rape, five indecent assaults; one count of procuring a
girl under 21 to have unlawful sexual intercourse with another; false
imprisonment, three counts of indecency with a child; one count of procuring
a woman under 21 to become a common prostitute; two assaults occasioning
actual bodily harm and one count of making threats to kill.
Bannaras ‘Bono’ Hussain
ADMITTED: Two rapes; six indecent assaults; an assault occasioning
actual bodily harm and procuring a woman to be a prostitute.
He denied a further count of rape which will lie on file.
Qurban ‘Blind Ash’ Ali
GUILTY OF: Conspiracy to rape.
Karen MacGregor
GUILTY OF: One count of conspiracy to procure a woman under 21 to
become a common prostitute and false imprisonment.
Shelley Davies
GUILTY OF: One count of conspiracy to procure a woman under 21 to
become a common prostitute and false imprisonment.