Inside the quiet former cotton city now terrorised by machete drug gangs
Rival organised crime groups have taken over Rochdale , which has been blighted by tit for tat warfare and horror fights involving weapons in recent years.
Rochdale has been blighted by warfare
A tiny northern town that once was a quiet working class area has been besieged by drug warlords, with knife and gun crime now rife. Rival organised crime groups have taken Rochdale, which has been blighted by tit for tat warfare and horror fights involving weapons in recent years.
Last week, it was heard how police are often called to a lawless area just north of the town centre during a court case involving two men wielding a sword in the dead of night.
A jury heard how at around 11.40pm on May 22, 2021, two masked men forced their way inside a house in the area and attacked a 27-year-old man who was asleep in bed.
Abbas Mushtaq woke to find the two men slashing at him with a sword and a machete, with the attack only stopped when his mother Zahida stood in the middle and tried to wrestle the weapons away.
The sword ended up wedged in the wall and the two freed the weapon, before fleeing the scene, but Mushtaq was heavily hurt and spent ten days in hospital.
He has been left scarred by cuts that went right to the bone and one of the attackers Owais Ali was jailed for six years for wounding with intent. He was identified as a member of an organised crime group, but the court heard how it was just one incident in heavy crimes around the area.
Others involved in the attack – getaway driver Mohammed Hassan Alam, 26, Asad Ali, 31, who ‘orchestrated’ the attack, and his wife Sonia Ali, 34, – were all jailed and named as gang members.
Police involved in the case revealed how they have – while trying to bring justice in the case – faced death threats and intimidation from other gang members.
Officers have been trying to dismantle two of the biggest gangs – the most dominant named the Adam OCG, which “pretty much ruled Rochdale” before this. Two other OCGs have also been taken down as police try and get a hold on the area.
Other incidents in the area have seen a car being driven by one gang member rammed in broad daylight, which caused it to flip three or four times before a rival armed gang surrounded him, wielding a machete, axe, baseball bat, combat knife and chainsaw.
He was hacked at, beaten and slashed before being doused with corrosive ammonia. A BBC documentary has even been made about the challenges in the area, with a detective speaking out exactly what his team was up against in Rochdale.
He said: “You will get acid attacks, machete attacks, incidents in which people have been scalped on the street. And almost all extreme violence in the area is linked to gangs.”
Those living on Mellor Street where Mushtaq was attacked are only too aware.
A nurse told the Daily Mail: “Sometimes it’s like a Mafia TV series but it’s real. It’s not a nice place to bring up children. I grew up in Rochdale but it’s different now. Community was once everything in this town but it seems to have gone.”
‘I’m scared to go out at night. There was a stabbing near here just the other week that was apparently gang-related.”
