‘My imam attacked me at my local mosque’

NABILA’S parents used to send her to their local mosque in Birmingham for religious instruction from the age of seven.

The Bangladeshi imam, Hafiz Rehman, subjected her to escalating sexual abuse for four years, finally attempting to rape her.

‘I used to think about telling my mum every day as I walked home,’ she says.

‘But I was scared. Would she believe me? How could I say such things about an imam?’

Sometimes she avoided classes by hiding in a graveyard. But she kept silent and even today, as a married mother, ‘intimacy seems dirty. If I do start to enjoy sex, I feel I must have enjoyed it when he was doing those things to me’.

She went to the police years later, and after a second mosque victim came forward, he was convicted in 2016 and sentenced to 11 and a half years in jail.

Astonishingly, Rehman had been on bail and was allowed to stay at home at the end of the trial by claiming he was ill. He had surrendered his UK passport, but had a second, Bangladeshi one – and the day after he was sentenced he fled there, where he remains. Nabila says abuse is rife in Muslim communities, but ‘never discussed, always covered up. The culture is, “we will deal with this, we don’t need anyone’s help” – but we don’t tackle it. There is abuse in almost every Asian family.

‘They get away with it in their own community, and then they target vulnerable white girls.

‘This culture has got to change.’