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Rotherham child abuse trial: four men and two women found guilty Rotherham child abuse trial: four men and two women found guilty
(about 1 hour later)
A gang of four men and two women, including three brothers, have been convicted of serious child sexual abuse crimes over more than 10 years in Rotherham in the first such trial since the Jay report into extensive child exploitation in the town. Six men and women were found guilty of offences relating to the sexual exploitation of teenage girls in Rotherham, as it emerged that the conduct of more than 50 officers from South Yorkshire who had dealt with the victims is now under investigation.
The group targeted 15 vulnerable girls, one as young as 11, and subjected them to brutal and degrading acts between 1987 and 2003. A gang of three brothers, their uncle and two women were found guilty of 55 serious offences, some of which lay undetected for almost 20 years. They targeted 15 vulnerable girls, one as young as 11, and subjected them to brutal and degrading acts between 1987 and 2003 including rape, forced prostitution, indecent assault and false imprisonment.
The abuse was orchestrated by Arshid Hussain, 40, who was found guilty of 23 counts including multiple counts of rape and indecent assault in addition to false imprisonment, abduction of a girl, and aiding and abetting rape. Allegations by victims that those found guilty – Arshid, Basharat and Bannaras Hussain, their uncle Qurban Ali and their associates Karen MacGregor and Shelley Davies – were able to commit crimes for so long with apparent impunity are now the focus of two separate investigations into the police.
It can now be reported that the Independent Police Complaints Commision (IPCC) has launched 55 separate investigations into how South Yorkshire police dealt with victims, in one of the biggest inquiries into potential neglect of duty and corruption in recent policing history.
The police watchdog said that 46 misconduct notices had already been served on 26 officers, and warned the figure could increase. It is understood that more than 50 officers are being investigated. Complaints cover “a range of allegations from a failure to act on reported child sexual exploitation to corruption by police officers,” it said.
The National Crime Agency (NCA) is also undertaking what it described as the “largest criminal investigation of its kind in the UK” into grooming and sexual explotiation in the South Yorkshire town, with 9,000 lines of inquiry.
The NCA said it currently had a total of 23 designated suspects but added that it had “hundreds of potential suspects still to investigate”. So far it said it had identified and recorded 57 serious sexual offences.
Related: Child sex abuse in Rotherham: 'I was treated as a criminal … never as a victim'Related: Child sex abuse in Rotherham: 'I was treated as a criminal … never as a victim'
Now in a wheelchair after he was shot in the stomach, he was not present in court to hear the verdicts. He was connected to the court from his home by video link but slept throughout the return of verdicts. Operation Stovewood, the NCA inquiry, is concentrating on the period between 1997 and 2013. Their work follows on from a report by Prof Alexis Jay, a former commissioner of social work, who had warned in 2014 that sex abuse could have affected as many as 1,400 children in the town, blaming failures of leadership amongst the police and local council.
The end of the trial is expected to have far-reaching consequences, with two follow-on police investigations and legal actions: It also reflects suspicion that child abuse was continuing in the town despite complaints to Rotherham police, that are now known to have been made, in the 1990s and the decade following by victims in the Rotherham trial.
• The IPCC said it had launched 55 separate investigations into how South Yorkshire police dealt with victims, in one of the biggest inquiries into potential neglect of duty and corruption in recent policing history. The police watchdog said that 46 misconduct notices had already been served on 26 officers, and warned the figure could increase. Some of the 15 victims who were abused by the gang watched the verdicts from the public gallery overlooking the packed court, some holding hands with each other. Arshid Hussain, 40, who is in a wheelchair after being shot, appeared from his bed at home via video link and seemed to be asleep. Basharat Hussain, 39, was surrounded by prison officers in the dock and was taken away along with MacGregor and Davies. Judge Sarah Wright said all will be sentenced on Friday.
• The National Crime Agency (NCA) has launched what it has described as the “largest criminal investigation of its kind in the UK” into grooming in the South Yorkshire town, with 9,000 lines of inquiry. The NCA said it currently had a total of 23 designated suspects but added that it had “hundreds of potential suspects still to investigate”. So far it said it had identified and recorded 57 serious sexual offences. Martin Tait, the senior investigating officer, described the Hussains as “vile individuals” who exploited the girls because “in their eyes” the abuse would “enhance their lifestyle”.
• A Sheffield solicitor, David Greenwood, said he was acting for 65 women who were planning to sue Rotherham metropolitan borough council. He is also planning legal action against South Yorkshire police. Arshid Hussain managed to avoid immediate custody following the guilty verdicts after his wife called an ambulance for him for alleged emergency treatment. He was whisked away to hospital in Scunthorpe, but the prosecution said it was a “deliberate attempt” to “frustrate” the process of taking him into custody.
Hussain’s brother Basharat was found guilty of 15 counts including multiple counts of indecent assault, indecency with a child and threatening to kill a brother of one of his victims. A third Hussain brother, Bannaras, pleaded guilty to 10 offences before the three-month trial started. His pleas can be reported for the first time. The IPCC inquiry represents the first of a series of upcoming tests for South Yorkshire police, which is bracing itself for yet more criticism over its handling of the Hillsborough disaster when an inquest jury is expected to return a verdict in the coming weeks into the 96 Liverpool fans who died at the Sheffield stadium.
Their uncle Qurban Ali was found guilty of one charge, conspiracy to rape. “Knowing that these things were going on and people were aware of them and failed these young girls – it wasn’t a single officer, it was the entire force that has a case to answer,” said Alan Billings, the South Yorkshire police and crime commissioner whose job is to hold the force to account on the public’s behalf.
Two other defendants, Sajid and Majid Bostan, were acquitted of all charges. But he said the public needed answers. Some of the complaints about officers have been lying on file for two years, he said. “For South Yorkshire police to recover from this they have to to face the truth in its totality. They can’t afford to go into denial if confidence is going to be restored in them,” Billings said.
Karen MacGregor, 58, lured two of the victims into her house, befriending them and behaving like a second mother but then forcing them into sexual relations with men who would hang around the house. Arshid and Basharat Hussain were known criminals operating in the drugs business with a string of convictions but none relating to grooming. One victim said they felt they would never be punished because she felt they “owned” Rotherham. They also operated in Sheffield, Blackpool and Tottenham in London, where girls were forced to have sex with other men.
She was convicted of conspiracy to rape, false imprisonment and procuring one of the women to become a common prostitute. Evidence through the three month trial also exposed shortcomings at Rotherham council. Men were caught late at night in the bedroom of one victim in a children’s home. Another was allowed to be picked up from her foster home as long as her abuser dropped her home by 10pm.
Shelley Davies, who had been portrayed by her barrister as a victim, lived with MacGregor for a time and was found guilty of procuring one of the victims to become a common prostitute, and false imprisonment. David Greenwood, a Sheffield solicitor, acting for 65 victims is planning to sue Rotherham metropolitan borough council for alleged negligence with more victims expected to come forward following Wednesday’s verdicts.
One of the victims described MacGregor’s house as like something out of the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel, inviting to begin with but soon descending into a terrifying sexual crime. She told the jury how she felt MacGregor was like a second mother, listening to her problems, buying her food and clothes. But within days she was assaulted. She was plied with vodka and after passing out awoke to find a man abusing her. Some of the victims fear the inquiries will not go far enough, and may brush police failures under the carpet. One of them, who spoke to the Guardian, said she made a complaint about an officer 14 years ago when her abuser, Arshid Hussain, held her by the throat and threatened to throw her over a balcony in Rotherham town market.
Hussain was a known criminal in the town with a string of convictions. He was described by the prosecution as “domineering and in some instances brutal” to his victims, sometimes using them as sex slaves to settle his debts. She had had a baby with Hussain and wanted nothing more to do with him. She said the police officer told her it was her fault. “He said ‘he’s got every right to [push you over the balcony], you stopped him seeing his son’.” Throughout the trial a succession of women gave evidence that they had reported the abuse to police but were not heeded.
He denied sexual activity with eight of his nine victims and said sexual relations with the ninth, which started when the girl was 14, were consensual. Several officers were named in the case. One, PC Kenneth Dawes, was arrested last June on suspicion of misconduct in public office. He has denied any wrongdoing.
But the jury heard he passed the lead victim around among his brother and friends and arranged for her to be abused in flats, garages and houses in the Rotherham area. She was also bundled into the boot of a car and taken to Tottenham in north London where she was forced to have sex with five men to clear his debts. She was in the care of the local authority at the time. One of the victims in the trial said she told him of abuse she suffered at the age of 13 or 14 years of age but that he did nothing and his failure to act on her complaint meant she did not have any confidence to report continuing abuse.
The violence against her became regular and no one in her care home expressed concern when she returned bloodied or shaken from encounters. The jury heard that Hussain climbed up the drainpipe at a children’s home to get to one of his victims. Another officer named in court, PC Hussain Ali, died following a road accident the day he was put on restricted duties in relation to allegations of misconduct, neglect of duty, and corrupt practice. Among the complaints being investigated was an allegation that he asked one of the victims in the trial out on a date.
Five of the girls became pregnant as a result of the abuse, two at the age of 14. Two of them gave birth. The same woman, known as Girl J, also accused him of being involved in a corrupt no-prosecution deal with Arshid Hussain.
Basharat Hussain’s first victim was just 12 when he picked her up from a children’s home and forced her into oral sex. She described the “awful conditions” she lived in and how she was lured to Blackpool by two of his friends, locked up in a room above a restaurant and made to “pay her way” with sex. Basharat groomed another victim by showering her with gifts including perfume and mobile phones.
The 12th victim endured horrific abuse at the hands of Basharat who would slap, punch, kick and spit at her. He called her a slag, threatened to harm her family if she did not go out with him and said he would burn her brother’s house down. He told her he had shovels in the boot of his car and she could dig her own grave. He also threatened to kill her brother.
The trial is the first of its kind since Prof Alexis Jay published her damning report into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, which said 1,400 children had been abused by gangs of mainly Asian males in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013.
Sarah Champion, the Labour MP for Rotherham and shadow minister for preventing child abuse, said she was no longer shocked by the past systemic failings of authorities in the town. “I find it incredibly frustrating because these are paid professionals but I think the thing that shocked me is that people think this can happen only in Rotherham. It will be happening in every town across the country, there’s no doubt about it,” she said.
“There’s a reason it’s in towns and not cities. If you think of Rotherham, Rochdale, Derby, Peterborough – it’s because it’s easier for a gang to get hold of a whole town. If there were more people coming in and out of the town, if it was more savvy, I don’t think it would have been allowed to go on.”
Alan Billings, the crime commissioner for South Yorkshire police, said the men had brought “so much misery and cruelty to these young women” and the verdicts would send a message to other potential child abusers that they would be prosecuted.
He said the girls’ childhoods had been lost and paid tribute to their courage in going to court. He acknowledged the “institutional failures of the past” and said he hoped what had happened in court would begin to put right some of the injustices of the past.
Billings, who is responsible for holding South Yorkshire police to account, said the entire force had a case to answer to the public.
But he said the IPCC was taking too long with its inquiry and it needed to understand that the public wanted answers about the “institutional failure” of the police force.
He will discuss Rotherham with the IPCC on Monday.
“Part of the complaint is that they’ve just got to get on with this,” he said. “They have had a lot of these complaints for two years now. The people of South Yorkshire and Rotherham want to know they are being investigated and the truth to be told.
“For South Yorkshire police to recover from this they have to face the truth in its totality. They can’t afford to go into denial if confidence is going to be restored in them.”
He said the convictions were a milestone in the recovery process.