THE SNAPCHAT GROOMING GANG
Teenagers used message app for targeting girls to ‘satisfy adolescent lust’
FOUR teenagers who sexually abused girls and treated them ‘like trophies’ have been jailed for a total of 17 years.
The gang, who contacted some of their victims using the Snapchat messaging app, have also been banned from using it for eight years.
They forced victims as young as 13 to perform sex acts and one later shared intimate pictures online. Two others even swapped victims after picking them up in a car.
Police launched an investigation after one of the girls saw an educational video about sexual exploitation and realised what was happening. She then found the courage to tell her father.
Taiyab Hussain, 19, Mohammed Hizar Rizwan, 18, Shaheem Ratyal, 19, and Sohail Raja Ali, 19, all from Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire, were jailed yesterday after admitting 22 offences against five girls.
Judge Jonathan Gosling insisted the case was ‘nothing like Rochdale’ – the child grooming scandal in which a group of Asian men abused vulnerable teenagers after plying them with drink and drugs.
He said the men were ‘schoolboys’ not ‘predatory paedophiles’. But he added: ‘The girls meant nothing to them, they were an agency to satisfy their adolescent lust.
‘These were young men treating the young girls like trophies, and to some extent, one was spurring on another.’
The victims had been subject to ‘extreme’ offences, he said, by men who had a ‘common interest’ in abusing them.
Stafford Crown Court heard how one of the victims, aged 14, met Ratyal when he was 17 and delivering a pizza to her home.
He admitted he ‘initiated sexual contact with her’, before forcing her to perform sex acts and sharing intimate pictures of her. The judge said Ratyal ‘convinced his victim that he loved her’ and ‘she, in her childlike way... thought she loved him’.
Ali first met his victim on Snapchat. She was just 13 and he was 18. She told police that the sexual activity with Ali ‘had a massive impact on her’.
The court heard Rizwan and Hussain picked up two victims in a car and forced them to perform sex acts. The next day, they picked them up again, but this time swapped girls.
The offences took place between December 2016 and March last year.
Hussain was sentenced to five years in prison. The court heard he had sent highly sexualised text messages on Snapchat before abusing an ‘out of control’ teenager in his car.
Rizwan and Ratyal were each jailed for four years and four months. Ali was sentenced to four years after he admitted offences against a 13-year-old.
They were all also given sexual harm prevention orders for eight years, during which they cannot use Snapchat, and lifetime registration on the sex offenders’ register.
The court heard two of the men had planned to go to university before their convictions.
Ratyal, whose family runs a pizza business, had been accepted to train as a teacher. His barrister, Mark Nicholls, said that his client now knows this ambition ‘is at an end’.
Darron Whitehead, defending Hussain, said the sixth-former had resigned from his part-time job after his arrest. ‘At the time of these offences he was doing well at school,’ he said.
Mohammed Latif, mitigating for Rizwan, said his ‘intelligent’ client had also secured a university place which he had been unable to take up. The judge heard Ali had previous convictions for disorder and violence.
Ali’s barrister, Babir Adris, said the prosecution was very different from cases where middle-aged men had groomed victims over long periods.
Urging the judge to pass a lenient sentence, Mr Adris said: ‘The other defendants and Ali are still very young. I would ask that they are given an opportunity to start again.’
The judge said: ‘At the time of the offences they were 17 or 18. There was communication between the defendants and it does establish their interest in sexually abusing these girls.’
‘One was spurring on the other’