On Wednesday (1st October), a 65-year-old British-Pakistani Muslim ringleader, Mohammed Zahid, was sentenced to 35 years in jail as he was found guilty of 20 offences. The Pakistani Muslim has been convicted of rape, indecency with a child, and attempting to procure a girl to have unlawful sex.
Besides, Mohammed Zahid, six others have been given jail sentences totalling 174 years after a Greater Manchester Police investigation into multiple child sex offences committed against two girls 25 years ago.
Father of three children, Mohammed Zahid worked at a stall in Rochdale Market in the north-west England. The Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court found Pakistani origin Zahid guilty of grooming the two minor non-Muslim girls.
Zahid plied them with alcohol and drugs to be abused by the other Pakistani Muslim men. The victims were also given places to stay by the men, who worked on the town’s market or as taxi drivers.
Between 2001 and 2006, the group was found guilty of a number of sexual offences against the girls.
According to the trial, the victims, identified as Girls A and B, were raised from the age of 13 and treated like “sex slaves,” with the expectation that they would “have sex with the men whenever and wherever they wanted.”
While Girl B said that social workers had considered her “a prostitute” since she was ten years old, Girl A informed the jury that she may have been the target of over 200 men. “There was that many it was hard to keep count,” Girl A told the court.
Girl B, who lived in children’s home when she came in contact with Pakistani Muslim rape Jihadis, said that police and social workers knew what was going on but “weren’t concerned enough to do anything about it”.
“It was in my file, when I looked it up. I read it. I was picked up by the police for loitering and prostituting from the age of 10,” Girl B, who is now in her 30s, said.
The prosecution told the court that the girls were “children passed around for sex, abused, degraded and then discarded”.
Other than Mohammed Zahid, who led this grooming or rape jihad gang, Mushtaq Ahmed, 67, and Kasir Bashir, 50, were also convicted by the court.
Known as “Bossman”, Zahid, gave free underwear from his lingerie stall to the girls, who did not know each other. He gifted money, alcohol and food to the victims and sought regular sex with him and his friends in return.
In a previous grooming gang case in 2016, Zahid was sentenced to five years in prison for having sex with a 15-year-old girl he met when she came to his stall to purchase school tights in 2006.
Bashir fled on bail before the trial began, therefore he did not show up for the current one.
Reports say that other Muslim groomers, Nisar Hussain, Mohammed Shahzad, and Naheem Akram, were placed under remand in custody in January.
The three cab drivers had previously paid a deposit for their transit, and police were informed that they were going to leave the UK.
The jurors deliberated for three weeks before delivering a unanimous sentence against the accused Pakistani Muslim rape jihadis.
The United Kingdom has been rocked by several cases of Pakistani grooming gangs in Rochdale, Rotherham, Telford among other areas, that targeted young British girls, even those who were underage, inflicting physical abuse, rape and torture for decades. The government, authorities and media have also been accused of attempting to underplay the severity of these offenses to avoid being branded as racists.
In the late 90s, young girls, some as young as 11, were picked up, raped, beaten, sold, and even killed by grooming gangs or rape gangs for a full forty years. In Rotherham alone, it was found that 1,400 children had been sexually abused over 16 years by British Pakistani men.
In August this year, Great Yarmouth MP Rupert Lowe said that the Rape Gang Inquiry report has found that Pakistani Muslim rape gangs have been operating in as many as 85 areas across the United Kingdom.
Earlier this year, The National Audit on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse report prepared by Baroness Louise Casey revealed that more than 500,000 children a year were likely to experience child sexual abuse, with police recording some 100,000 offences in 2024. Of these, an estimated 17,100 were flagged as child sexual exploitation. The only figure for gang grooming came from a new police database, totalling just 700. Lady Casey said it was “highly unlikely” that this accurately reflected the true scale of grooming gangs.
The report revealed that Pakistani men are responsible for 64 per cent of cases of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham. Moreover, of the total 42 individuals convicted for child sexual exploitation offences under Operation Stovewood, most were Pakistani men.
