DID you hear the one in regards to the youngster rapist who was additionally a welfare rights officer at Oldham Council?
You simply couldn’t make up the story of Shabir Ahmed, certainly one of 9 males convicted in 2012 of intercourse crimes in opposition to ladies aged 13 to fifteen within the Rochdale and Oldham areas. He was given a 22-year jail sentence.
In a 202-page report revealed this week, authored by Malcolm Newsam, a famend youngster care skilled, and Gary Ridgeway, a former detective superintendent with Cambridgeshire Police, Better Manchester Police and Oldham Council had been criticised for failing to guard some kids from sexual exploitation.
A transparent standout failing was Shabir Ahmed, who was a ringleader of a grooming youngster rape gang in Rochdale. He was employed as a ‘welfare rights officer’ by Oldham Council regardless of having been arrested for youngster sexual assault.
Pricey reader, after all he was. That is Britain, house of the safeguarding officer, the danger evaluation on the hazard of getting conkers at school, and ‘well being and security’. So clearly, clearly, nobody informed the council that the bloke employed as a ‘welfare rights officer’ was the truth is an actual and current hazard to the women of Oldham.
The report famous that Better Manchester Police had been informed in 2005 of a ‘severe allegation of kid sexual abuse’ perpetrated by Ahmed, a divorced father of 4, however officers failed to tell Oldham Council.
The report stated: ‘As a welfare rights officer, he would probably have had contact with a variety of susceptible adults and their kids. This matter ought to subsequently have been referred to Oldham Council as his employer. If this had occurred, it could have probably prevented the tragic abuse of different kids.’
Woulda, coulda, shoulda …
Ahmed was charged in 2011 with the rape of the kid first delivered to the eye of police in 2005. Regardless of allegations of ‘profound youngster sexual abuse’, the report stated there isn’t any proof that the council performed an evaluation of Ahmed’s ‘circumstances’.
The report additionally discovered that Oldham Council’s taxi licensing service didn’t a lot care who acquired a licence. The truth is, it had no downside in issuing licences to males who had dedicated severe sexual offences in opposition to kids. In 2014, a council overview recognized 5 drivers with severe legal convictions. Just one had his licence revoked.
Lastly, there may be the fairly unbelievable story of ‘Sophie’, sufferer of a horrific a number of rape assault on the age of simply 12. However why didn’t she go to the police? Properly, she did go to the police, however they didn’t a lot care about Sophie’s welfare. The truth is, it was from a police station that Sophie was kidnapped after which gang-raped.
It occurred like this. Sophie went to Oldham police station to report being raped by an Asian man in October 2006. The police weren’t bothered a couple of 12-year-old woman coming to report a rape. She was informed to come back again when she was ‘not drunk’.
Unbelievably, Sophie was then kidnapped by a person who was additionally visiting the police station, and raped in a automobile by two males, earlier than being taken to a home and raped a number of instances by 5 completely different males.
The report additionally stated that residents of a road together with the home the place Sophie was raped had ‘repeatedly informed the council a couple of large-scale grooming operation through which taxis would amass on the road each Wednesday evening and youngsters could be taken to the deal with in a conveyor belt trend’.
The response of the council to a letter from the chair of the Commons Dwelling Affairs Choose Committee, regarding the abuse that Sophie had suffered, described her complaints as ‘litigious’ and refused to reply the chair’s enquiries ‘because of the passage of time’.
Simply what precisely is the purpose of the police? How can a toddler who has gone to a police station to report a rape truly be ignored after which kidnapped from that police station to be horrifically abused and raped once more?
How can kids be taken to a home to be raped in a ‘conveyor belt trend’ in plain view? There aren’t any phrases that may describe such a demonic state of affairs.
The response by the council and police has been that ‘issues have modified’. I wouldn’t guess on it.
Editor’s observe: Right here is Laura discussing the case with Mark Steyn final evening:
