Ex-law chief tells how he ordered a fresh look at grooming case
THE former chief prosecutor for the north west has described how he reversed a decision not to press charges against the Rochdale child sex grooming gang.
Nazir Afzal said he was shocked by his lawyers’ argument that the main victim had ‘made a choice to work as a prostitute’.
Newly installed as chief crown prosecutor for the north west, he reversed the decision and ordered GMP to look afresh at sexual grooming in Rochdale, which resulted in nine men of largely Pakistani heritage being jailed for plying a string of vulnerable white girls with vodka before abusing them and sharing them with others across the north west.
Mr Afzal, who left the post in 2015, tells a new BBC documentary about the scandal, The Betrayed Girls, that he was shocked at the original decision which lawyers had reached before he was installed.
He said: “The thing that struck me most was these were still children. You know. I have children of my own and just because you are 14 or 15 you can’t make informed choices. And the perpetrators were in their 40s 50s - you know, my age - and they clearly knew better.”
He added: “When I read the prosecutor’s advice to the officers in the earlier investigation (there were) things like ‘she has made a choice about her life’ and ‘she has agreed in effect to be a prostitute for these men’. Everything about it shocked me, to be blunt, because what groomers do, what perpetrators do, is manipulate... and the fact that she was chaotic and troubled was actually the reason why she was targeted.
“Because the perpetrator knew that, nobody would believe her.”
He went on: “I was absolutely certain in my mind that the decision taken in this case was wrong. It wasn’t just unreasonable, which is the legal test. It was wrong. And if it was wrong, I had to reverse that decision to maintain public confidence. And so I did.”
The documentary features some of the victims of the abuse, as well as the father of one of them, although they cannot be identified under laws which protect the identity of victims of sex crimes.
It is a follow-up to a dramatisation of the scandal, Three Girls, which starred Maxine Peake and which aired last month.
The 90-minute programme was shown on BBC1 on Monday.