The ringleader of a group of men who raped and abused two teenage girls in the northern English town of Rochdale was sentenced to 35 years in prison on Wednesday, in the latest criminal case in Britain seeking accountability for decades of offending by so-called “grooming gangs.”
Mohammed Zahid, now 65, was sentenced alongside six other men for raping the girls, whom he targeted from the age of 13 after they started working at his market stall.
Prosecutors said that Mr. Zahid gave the victims gifts and money before sexually abusing and raping them. In a period between 2001 and 2006, the girls were separately taken to different addresses and remote locations where they were plied with alcohol and forced to have sex with a network of local market traders and taxi drivers.
Rochdale was among the first British towns to be revealed as a hub of sexual grooming gangs by investigative journalists in the early 2010s, prompting a nationwide scandal and years of prosecutions and inquiries into why the perpetrators were not stopped sooner.
Like many gang members prosecuted in other areas of England, the men sentenced on Wednesday were mostly of Pakistani heritage and deployed tactics described by experts as the “boyfriend model.” Perpetrators gained the trust of vulnerable girls by offering them food, alcohol, cigarettes or other inducements, developed a relationship of dependency, and then forced them into sexual activity with other men.
Mr. Zahid and his co-defendants were investigated by a child sexual exploitation investigations unit within the Greater Manchester Police that was formed in 2021, the police said in a statement. The force said it was one of two major investigations that have so far resulted in 32 offenders being jailed for a combined total of 474 years for grooming gang activity in Rochdale. Twenty more men are awaiting trial.
In January, the grooming gangs issue returned to international headlines after Elon Musk, the billionaire tech mogul, used his social media platform to post a series of vitriolic posts about it that included many inaccuracies and smears. In response to growing public pressure, the government announced a full national inquiry into the issue in June.
Detective Chief Inspector Guy Laycock, who led the investigation, said in a statement that the convictions would not have been possible without the “painful and difficult testimony” given by the two victims during a four-month trial at which the defendants denied all offenses.
“The men abused, degraded and then discarded the victims when they were just children,” he said.
One of the victims, identified as “girl B” in court because of British laws protecting the identities of sexual abuse victims, attended the sentencing in a Manchester court and delivered a statement describing how she had felt “shame and guilt” over the abuse.
She urged other victims to come forward, the BBC reported. “The day I watched the verdicts changed my life,” she said. “I instantly had a massive weight lifted off me.”
Prosecutors said that both victims were from vulnerable backgrounds and were known to social services, and that one was living in the care system while being abused.
Mr. Zahid raped both victims, who did not know each other, and took them to locations where they were “plied with alcohol and expected to have unprotected sex with other men,” including three of the co-defendants Mushtaq Ahmed, 66, Kasir Bashir, 50, and Roheez Khan, 39, prosecutors said.
Another co-defendant, Mohammed Shahzad, 43, was a taxi driver who met the second victim when she was 13. He befriended her and offered her lifts before starting to rape her and drive her to remote locations where she was abused by other taxi drivers. Among them were Nisar Hussain, 41, and Naheem Akram, 48, who were also sentenced on Friday.
A report on grooming gangs released as part of the wider Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in England and Wales in 2022 found that “extensive failures” by local councils and the police had left victims being treated as “child prostitutes,” while perpetrators were not investigated or prosecuted.
Many high-profile grooming gang prosecutions have involved men of Pakistani or Muslim origin, but the report said that a lack of formal data recording by the police made it “impossible to know” whether certain ethnic groups were overrepresented among abusers nationally. The government announced in June that it was implementing the inquiry’s recommendation that the police should record the ethnicity and nationality of all suspects in child sexual abuse and exploitation cases.
An official audit of previous cases also published in June described “many examples of organizations” avoiding the question of whether ethnicity or cultural factors were at play, “for fear of appearing racist, raising community tensions or causing community cohesion problems.”
On Wednesday, Sharon Hubber, the director of children’s services at Rochdale Borough Council, said in a statement that the authority was “in a very different place to where it once was.”
“Today’s sentencing,” she said, “is a reminder of our ongoing commitment, alongside Greater Manchester Police, in bringing these perpetrators to justice and we will not stop here in our efforts.”
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