Sex slave in a suburban cellar
She was smuggled into Britain from Pakistan aged ten and forced to cook, clean and wash all day – while at night her male captor climbed into her bed. Finally freed after nine years, her story is ANOTHER example of off icials failing to confront a wicked crime because they were terrif ied of being branded racist
AS A chief crown prosecutor, Nazir Afzal courageously pursued justice for those overlooked by society due to simple incompetence – or because the authorities feared being branded racist. In the first part of our serialisation of his memoirs, he told how he championed victims of the British-Pakistani child-sex grooming gangs. Here, he recounts another appalling example of violence against girls.
AYOUNG girl blinked in the early morning light at Heathrow Airport. People in strange clothes swarmed around, while security dogs sniffed at luggage and a woman mopped the floor. The smell of detergent was thick in the air. It made the girl feel sick. A man who’d sat beside her on the plane now gripped her shoulder and pushed her forward as they approached border control. On her other side, her wrist was in the tight clasp of a woman. Neither spoke to her.
Her heart was thumping, and she searched her pockets for the small rag doll she always carried. It wasn’t there.
At the desk, a man in a blue uniform studied some documents. He looked at her. The man and woman with the girl leaned in close to the official to listen to him. Profoundly deaf since childhood, the girl, Safiya, aged about ten, had no idea what was passing between them that day in June 2000. After a few moments, she and her two minders were allowed to pass.
Outside the airport, Safiya was bundled into a car which travelled at high speed along wide roads – so different from the narrow, dusty streets of Lahore in Pakistan she was used to. She cowered by the window, trying to make sense of what was happening. Where were her parents?
Exhausted from her long journey, she drifted into a deep sleep despite her fear.
When she awoke, her face was pressed against a cold floor in the dark and her whole body was shivering. After what seemed like several hours, a light clicked on, revealing a room with a makeshift desk, a chair and the little bed.
The door opened. There stood the man and woman who’d pushed her through the airport.
She was led upstairs to the main room of what seemed to be a large house. Safiya could not possibly have known it but she was now a captive in a house in Eccles near Manchester and, using a series of gestures, the couple explained what she was required to do. Her tasks were to cook, wash, sew, iron and clean the house. When not working she’d live in the cellar of the house where she’d slept the night before.
And so began for this tragic young woman a life of slavery and violence that defied belief. The days were long and, if she slowed or her attention wavered, retribution was swift and severe. Both the man and woman would kick, punch and slap her. They grabbed her hair and banged her head against the walls until she bled. She was attacked with a rolling pin and beaten savagely with a cooking pot.
Though Safiya could not hear them, her captors had devised their own communication system. They flicked the lights of her cellar on and off when she was needed. She was expected to respond immediately. If she wanted to use the toilet, she had to bang on the door until someone came and released her.
The physical scars began to add up, as did the months and years. She saw little of the outside world, and didn’t even know what country she was in. Five long years into Safiya’s ordeal, in 2005, Britain hosted the G8 Summit of leading nations. It included a rally to show solidarity with the world’s poorest people and at which a speaker declared that slavery had been made history. But slavery was not history – not for Safiya.
She had learned to expect her cellar door to open in the middle of the night. The man began to climb into her bed. Regular sexual abuse from her captor was added to her list of torments.
Only in her late- teens did an escape route finally open. Her jailers were selling counterfeit goods and had come to the attention of the police. Safiya had spent hours packing football shirts, clothes and phone covers from her prison.
Officers arrived at the house with a search warrant in the summer of 2009, and noticed the locked door leading to Safiya’s cellar, and found the traumatised, malnourished and terrified young woman, unable to speak or hear. The evidence of the physical and mental torture she had endured was overwhelming. I was horrified when I heard Safiya’s story. Never had I met anyone so entirely vulnerable and alone.
This was going to be a very difficult case – relying on the testimony of one person: Safiya.
She had to prove she’d been kept as a slave for all those years, and in telling what happened, she’d have to relive the horrifying ordeal of all the rapes she had endured.
I had long known there was a deep culture of slavery across South Asia, and suspected it could not be long before it was imported into Britain. And now here it was.
I knew about slave auctions in some countries such as India and Libya. And I was aware that in Pakistan alone there are two million people in bonded slavery, whereby human labour is used to settle a debt, rather than money.
We needed to use this case to show that slavery was not tolerated in the UK and never would be. Safiya was not alone. Others needed our help, and I would fight with every bone in my body to ensure they got it.
Week by week, new strands of Safiya’s story emerged.
With the help of a forensic anthropologist we discovered she was ten when brought to Britain from Pakistan, after being sold by her parents to traffickers.
Health professionals, translators, trauma counsellors, a police liaison officer, a registered intermediary, council workers and staff from the women’s refuge where she was now staying had all been helping
Airport staff missed a child being trafficked right under their noses
her. They saw scars from a kitchen knife, and learned how her captors had used her to claim welfare benefits fraudulently. Most depressingly, they uncovered a litany of institutional failings involving her arrival in Britain.
When Safiya had landed at Heathrow, her fake passport said she was aged 20, not ten. How could she have been allowed through? And how could her captors have provided convincing evidence to an Entry Clearance Officer to meet the necessary visa criteria? Immigration staff at Heathrow should have interviewed Safiya to check her visa had been issued for the correct purpose.
They also should have carried out a face-to-passport check. If they’d recognised she wasn’t an adult, they could have overturned her visa. Why didn’t they? I felt rising fury as the details emerged. At the time, Heathrow had a minors team, trained to deal with youngsters, yet had missed a child being trafficked right under their nose.
Records show an immigration officer even amended Safiya’s boarding card to include her date of birth to say she was 20. The whole thing was unbelievable.
A review of her case eventually concluded that a combination of ‘heavy workloads’, a ‘lack of awareness of child-trafficking for domestic servitude and sexual exploitation’ and ‘issues of assumptions on the basis of race or culture’ was behind the fact that numerous agencies had failed to recognise Safiya as a vulnerable child.
And this was just the start of it.
Immigration officers, housing benefit officers, GPs and NHS staff had all come into contact with her over the years and all had failed to see the helpless, trafficked victim in front of them. Not one had spotted she wasn’t an adult, despite weighing just five stone and being only 4ft tall when she arrived in Britain. ‘It seems possible that a lack of confidence about issues of race and culture may have inhibited some professionals asking too many questions,’ her case review suggested.
I believe that those agencies were averting their eyes from the things that were wrong because they didn’t want to be accused of being racist. And I am convinced it was this attitude that allowed her captors to avoid the scrutiny of those who should have protected Safiya. She, meanwhile, was responding well to support and had now learned sufficient sign language to communicate some aspects of her ordeal. It had taken two and a half years to get Safiya’s case to court but at least she now had the confidence to face the ordeal of her captors’ trial.
Legal history was made for the amount of time a sex abuse victim gave evidence in the witness box. In total, Safiya spent 49 days there. Week after week, I gazed in awe at her giving evidence via video link in Manchester Crown Court. It was remarkable seeing this diminutive woman telling her harrowing story through sign language and standing firm against everything her captors’ barristers threw at her.
Safiya became the calmest person in court. Police had described her as a ‘ butterfly coming out of a chrysalis’ and I felt privileged to witness this transformation.
The jurors found her captors, husband and wife Ilyas Ashar, who was 84, and Tallat Ashar, 67, guilty on a host of charges. Relief flooded through me. Two female jurors cried. The judge told Safiya’s captors: ‘You did not treat this girl as a human being. To you, she was merely an object to be used, abused and cast aside at will.’
In October 2013, they were jailed for rape, trafficking and furnishing false information to obtain a benefit. The following year, their sentences of 13 and five years respectively were extended by the Court of Appeal to 15 and six years.
But we hadn’t finished. I told my team I wanted to use the Proceeds of Crime Act – usually used to confiscate drug-dealers’ properties – to get the couple’s house, so they would pay more than their metaphorical dues. My reasoning was that, aside from the benefit fraud, they used her for everything. She was an asset to them and never received any money. And so, in 2014, Manchester Crown Court ordered the Ashars to pay £321,000 towards the cost of their trials and for Safiya to get £100,000 in compensation. Of course, the money in no way made up for what she’d suffered, but it could help towards her recovery and give her a chance to move on.
Inevitably, the case provoked widespread revulsion. But, sadly, trafficking stories were beginning to make headlines on a frequent basis. In one, a slavery ring with 24 people held in appalling conditions at a travellers’ camp was busted in Bedfordshire. In another, three women had been held captive in a South London house for 30 years.
The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope denounced this ‘grave evil’ and the UK Human Trafficking Centre confirmed they had received almost 1,500 reports of suspected cases. A draft Modern Slavery Bill began circulating in the Commons and I was invited to a government forum on crime.
I raised Safiya’s case with the then Home Secretary Theresa May. I explained why we desperately needed a change in the law – there had been no dedicated antitrafficking legislation in almost two centuries, since the time of William Wilberforce. We needed to guarantee victims more support and introduce tougher sentences. I had heard promises from politicians before, and so was sceptical when Mrs May vowed to treat this as an urgent issue. But she kept her word. In 2015, the Bill became law, introducing a modern slavery commissioner and an increase in the maximum custodial sentences for offenders from 14 years to life.
We couldn’t have made s uch progress without the bravery and courage of Safiya, and in the months and years that passed after her trial, I often wondered where her life had taken her. One day I got an answer. A colleague called to update me on her progress. For a few minutes I listened, transfixed. I didn’t think it was possible for Safiya to inspire me any more than she already had. But she had once again exceeded all expectations.
She was making up for lost time, studying for a career in the NHS – moving from being cared for to caring for others. In some ways, this didn’t surprise me. Experiencing trust and support for the first time can have a transformative effect on people.
I have no doubt it will only be a matter of time before she is working on the wards and tending to others’ needs, with whoever is fortunate enough to be treated by her in the most capable of hands.
Safiya will always be the truest proof to me of just how powerful the human spirit can be.