Violated once more and haunted by the paedophiles who raped us: How the evil Rochdale Nine have been handed a fortune in authorized assist so {that a} decade on solely ONE has been deported – to the anguish of victims

Few people outside the town of Rochdale would recognise Abdul Rauf if they saw him. But for those in the know in this Greater Manchester town, the sight of the 55-year-old paedophile, a key figure in one of the UK’s most notorious child grooming gangs, is an utter outrage which strikes at their hearts.

By rights this abusive monster should have been deported to his native Pakistan years ago but today, thanks largely to bureaucratic red tape and taxpayer-funded legal filibustering, he’s out of jail and back at home in his red-brick semi with his wife, five children and grandchildren – free to come and go as he pleases.

It’s almost as if the ‘callous, vicious and violent’ crimes he and his wicked associates inflicted on 47 girls as young as 12 between 2005 and 2008 simply never happened.

Scratch the surface, however, and as one of those children, now a grown woman, has told the Mail: ‘For all of us, it’s been a life sentence. It never stops. We have to live through it each and every day of our lives.’

Rauf himself was convicted in 2012 of trafficking a teenage girl and conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with a child after driving one 15-year-old victim to different locations where he and some of his monstrous cronies had sex with her up to 20 times.

The men, mainly British Pakistanis, often plied the girls with drink and drugs and passed them around for sex but police initially failed to investigate amid fears of being accused of racism.

Their victims live in fear of bumping into the perpetrators, most of whom served just a fraction of their sentences before being released and returning to Rochdale.

Former taxi driver Rauf, as we shall see, is one of three child sex abusers who should have been deported to Pakistan but have so far outfoxed the Home Office and managed to dig in their heels and stay, leaving their victims in fear of running into them around town.

‘How scary is that?’ says another former child survivor, now in her 20s, ‘to turn a corner and see a man who treated you like a piece of meat when you were just a kid?’

In a week which has seen the subject of Britain’s child grooming gangs return to the spotlight at Westminster, those still caught up in this never-ending nightmare – both victims and those who are still fighting on their behalf – have spoken to the Mail of their ongoing struggle for justice and their determination to eradicate these vile gangs once and for all. Their shared ordeals, their pleas for those in power to stamp out the evil still lurking in their communities once and for all, are a thousand times more powerful than the squabble over whether or not there should be a full, Government-led public inquiry into the issue of grooming gangs across Britain.

The row started last week after Labour’s safeguarding minister Jess Phillips rejected calls for a Government inquiry into historic grooming gangs in Oldham, another town, just seven miles from Rochdale, plagued by the problem, with Ms Phillips arguing that the council should lead a local inquiry instead.

Sir Keir Starmer argued this week that a new probe would only delay action being taken and blocked an attempt on Wednesday by the Conservatives to force the Government to set up a national inquiry, by ordering his Labour MPs to vote against it.

Tech billionaire and Trump supporter Elon Musk has also waded into the affray, accusing the Prime Minister of being ‘complicit in the rape of Britain’ for failing to tackle the problem during his tenure as Director of Public Prosecutions between 2008 and 2013.

Among a series of inflammatory posts on X, the social media site he owns, outspoken Musk even called for Sir Keir to be jailed.

On the streets of Rochdale, one of a handful of towns to be plagued by child sex exploitation rings including Rotherham, Oldham, Telford, Huddersfield, Oxford and Bristol, such political hurly burly is almost meaningless.

Survivors, campaigners and locals alike are more concerned that those apparently brought to justice have been able to return to the community and carry on their lives as if nothing happened.

‘I still have flashbacks to what happened to me – the indignities and the beatings I went through,’ said one of the abused girls who spoke to the Mail. ‘Everywhere there are reminders, the takeaways, the flats I was taken to, the places they’d park up so they could maul me or intimidate me.’

Campaigner Maggie Oliver, a former Greater Manchester Police detective who exposed her own force’s poor handling of the Rochdale child sex abuse ring, has revealed that another victim, who had to have a termination after being raped, came face to face in the aisle of Asda in Rochdale with the man who violated her and fled the store in hysterics.

She hadn’t even been told that her assailant was out of prison.

According to his furious neighbours who cannot understand how he has not been kicked out of the country, Abdul Rauf – once a religious studies teacher at a mosque in Rochdale – walks around ‘like he owns the place’.

After getting out of prison in November 2014, less than three years into a six-year sentence, he was even able to get a job for takeaway delivery app Foodhub. Stripped of his British citizenship, he was told he would be deported to Pakistan in 2015.

Immigration tribunal judges twice rejected his appeals in 2020 and 2022 and said there was a ‘very strong public interest’ argument for removing him.

But with the help of his lawyers and funded by thousands of pounds worth of legal aid, Rauf argued that deportation would leave him stateless because he had renounced his Pakistani citizenship and would strip him of his right to family life as set out in the Human Rights Act.

Two other members of the gang pulled the same stunt as Rauf, renouncing their Pakistani citizenship before being stripped of their UK citizenship. Their legal battle to stay is so far said to have cost more than £2 million in taxpayer-funded legal aid. It is believed the main reason they are still in this country is that Pakistan refuses to have them back.

Adil Khan, 54, is the child rapist who bumped into one of his victims in Rochdale’s Asda. Like Rauf, he renounced his Pakistani nationality just days before the Court of Appeal ruled he could be stripped of his UK citizenship, deliberately making himself stateless. Shamelessly, he claimed he needed to remain in Rochdale to ‘be a role model’ to his son.

Also avoiding being sent back to Pakistan despite being stripped of UK citizenship is 51-year-old Abdul Aziz, who took his 15-year-old victim to flats in Rochdale where she was plied with vodka and drugs and coerced into sex with gangs of men in return for payment to him.

A fourth gang member earmarked for deportation is 47-year-old Mohammed Sajid, who was jailed for 12 years in 2012 and was due for release late last year.

The gang’s twisted ringleader, 71-year-old Shabir Ahmed, who is still in prison, is also fighting deportation. Sentenced in 2012 to 22 years for rape, sexual assault, trafficking and conspiracy to engage in sexual activity, in theory he could remain in prison until around 2034.

But the founder of Rochdale-based Parents Against Grooming, Billy Howarth, told the Mail this week that one of Ahmed’s victims has been notified that he will be released in early 2026 and sent a map by Greater Manchester’s Sex Offender Management Unit showing a no-go area of Rochdale which Ahmed, who was once employed as a welfare officer by Oldham Council, must not enter.

‘For her it feels like a prison,’ said father-of-two Mr Howarth. ‘It’s the only place she can safely be without seeing him. But it’s not so much about keeping him out. She feels like she’s being kept in.’

He added that ‘for years’ he had been emailing the Home Office asking why other gang members had not been deported, without getting any answers.

‘They should have gone years ago,’ he says. ‘They’re walking around and there’s no restrictions on where they can go.’

The Home Office will not say why the men have not been deported, stating only that they do not comment on individual cases.

Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham has previously argued that ‘justice will finally be seen to be fully served only once these deportations are complete and only then will the community be able to heal’.

To date, only one of the nine convicted is thought to have been deported. Hamid Safi, an illegal immigrant who arrived in the UK after hiding underneath a lorry, is believed to have been sent back to his native Afghanistan.

The other members of the gang still said to be in the area are the youngest of the group, 38-year-old Kabeer Hassan, 57-year-old Mohammed Amin and 57-year-old Abdul Qayyum.

While the Rochdale nine were among the most high profile of the grooming gang prosecutions, there were scores of other cases.

Dozens of men have since been jailed for historic cases involving the sexual exploitation and abuse of young girls, including 42 last year in Huddersfield. The men, said a spokesman for West Yorkshire Police, ‘regarded their victims as objects to be used and then trivially discarded’. In

2023, Rishi Sunak’s government set up a Grooming Gangs Taskforce with qualified officers from all 43 police forces in England and Wales and data analysts.

By May last year, 550 suspects nationwide had been arrested and 4,000 victims identified.

Rochdale is now bracing itself for yet another trial, due to start this Monday at Minshull Street Crown Court in Manchester, which will see 11 men tried for historic grooming offences. The 103 charges against them relate to incidents involving teenage girls between 2000 and 2006.

Two further trials will follow this year, involving at least another 17 men from the town accused of child sexual exploitation.

In the meantime, the debate around whether or not there is a need for an overarching Government-led inquiry into the scandal continues to rage.

Several public inquiries have already examined the UK’s grooming gang scandal and published their findings, not least the Jay Report, published in 2014 at the end of an independent inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham.

Written by Professor Alexis Jay, it criticised Rotherham Council for failing to protect vulnerable child victims and said it had not addressed the ‘scale’ of grooming prior to 2014.

Professor Jay wrote in her report: ‘By far the majority of perpetrators were described as “Asian” by victims, yet throughout the entire period, councillors did not engage directly with the Pakistani-heritage community to discuss how best they could jointly address the issue.’

She later chaired the seven-year Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse, which in October 2022 published 19 reports on 15 investigations covering a wide range of institutions with the aim of better protecting children in the future.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4 this week, Professor Jay said: ‘We’ve had enough of inquiries, consultations and discussions –– especially the victims and survivors who’ve had the courage to come forward.’ She said that ‘people should get on with’ implementing her reforms and ‘locally people need to step up to the mark and do the things that have been recommended’.

Campaigner Maggie Oliver, who now runs a foundation helping survivors of abuse, says: ‘In order to get to the truth of why we have a problem with this particular kind of crime, we have to listen to the voices of victims, allow them to freely share their experiences and have open conversations as a country, and that includes members of the British Pakistani community. I’m not interesting in demonising one section of our society. I want to understand why we have this problem that repeatedly destroys children’s lives.’

One key change she believes must be introduced to get a grip on the problem is the recording of ethnicity of both victim and perpetrator when a sexual crime is committed. ‘If somebody says that this crime is not still going on, they’re not being truthful.’

She added: ‘I’m not interested in political point scoring. What we have, again this week, are all the officials, most of them have probably never even spoken to a victim, daring to speak on their behalf.’

Billy Howarth said he supports a new national inquiry but says that there needs to be a local one as well, free from the influence of implicated institutions or political figures, to hold those in authority to account.

The Rochdale scandal was dramatised in the BBC’s Bafta-winning Three Girls.

One of the real girls, now in her 30s, whose story was used for the script, said to the Mail: ‘We were told they would be kicked out of the country. Knowing that had been done would have been a huge help for all of us trying to rebuild our lives. But instead we are still haunted by the paedophiles who raped and trafficked us.

‘What messages does that send to the grooming gangs?’

Time and time again, amid expansive inquiries into failures on the part of police and local authorities to tackle the problem, those who survived these terrible crimes inflicted on them as children have been promised justice and change.

How can it be then that, close to two decades on, this national scandal has yet to be resolved?