Inside the ghoulish lair where women and children were subject to sickening abuse
Girls were plied with booze and used for sex
Joan Street, Newcastle THIS seemingly innocuous Tyneside flat was used as a sick sex den by Operation Sanctuary predators
Nestled on a row of compact properties on Benwell’s Joan Street, the flat looks like hundreds of others on the West End terraces.
But it was within these four walls that some of Newcastle’s most vulnerable girls and women were plied with drugs and booze before being exploited for sex.
The house, which was home to Nashir Uddin, is just one of a number of homes across the West End at the centre of the Operation Shelter abuse probe, which formed part of Northumbria Police’s Operation Sanctuary.
Newcastle Crown Court heard how girls and young women were lured to parties known as ‘sessions’ at the flat, and it Nashir Uddin became a venue used by the men to have sex with the girls they groomed.
The dark narrow hallway leads to one bedroom and a sitting room, while a small cluttered kitchen opens into a back yard.
With Uddin now behind bars, all traces of the horror that may have unfolded behind the home’s doors have been removed.
But the housing association flat’s new tenant told the Sunday Sun that knowing what may have gone on in his home has left him sickened.
The man, who asked not to be named, said: “The council never Inside Joan Street, Newcastle told me before I moved here but then someone in Benwell said they had heard that the man who used to live here had been arrested for grooming.
“I just thought; ‘Oh no’. I have never had any problems because of it, but it’s not a nice thing to hear. It’s just horrible to think these things go on. I know it’s happened up and down the country, but to know someone like that has lived in your home is horrible.”
Darren Maddison, who lives on nearby Clara Street, said people living in the West End had not