Brothers of evil
Finally behind bars, four monsters from single family who led Rotherham gang that abused teenage girls for a decade
A VILE sex gang which targeted and abused teenage girls for a decade was led by these four brothers, it can be revealed.
The last of the siblings who ran Rotherham’s most notorious paedophile ring was jailed for 19 years yesterday.
Sageer Hussain and brothers Arshid, Basharat and Bannaras used sophisticated grooming to repeatedly rape the young girls, before using intimidation to keep their crimes secret.
Sageer, 30, once said: ‘ All white girls are good for is sex and they are just slags.’
Yesterday’s sentencing meant that the brothers will collectively spend 98 years behind bars.
Their family connection could not be reported until now for legal reasons, after a series of trials.
One girl, 13, was attacked and violently raped 13 times, and was told her mother would be gangraped if she went to the police.
The family ‘ruled Rotherham’ and had a reputation for the violence and bravado with which they carried out their attacks, which were often in public places.
Judge Sarah Wright, speaking at Sheffield Crown Court during Sageer Hussain’s sentencing, said: ‘It was a campaign of violent rape against a 13-year-old vulnerable girl. You used sophisticated grooming of your victim, you are clearly not immature and you used extremely degrading and violent behaviour towards your victim who suffered extraordinary humiliation.’
Sageer Hussain was sentenced – alongside seven other defendants including Basharat, 40 – to 19 years for 16 offences against three young girls between 1993 and 2003.
Basharat had also been found guilty at another trial in February, when Arshid and Bannaras were sentenced. Arshid was found guilty of 23 offences including indecent assault and rape and jailed for 35 years in February.
Bannaras was jailed at the time for 19 years after admitting ten charges.
Basharat was found guilty at the first trial of 15 offences including rape and jailed for 25 years.
He was further convicted of an indecent assault yesterday and will serve a seven-year sentence to run concurrently with his other jail term. The four brothers come from a family of four boys and four girls – whose Pakistani-born father Amir moved to the UK in 1956 for a job in a steelworks.
Mr Hussain, later set up a successful window manufacturing business. But the sons shunned their father’s success. The Hussain brothers drove around in a Subaru sports car with the number plate G8 ASH, bragging to girls that ‘we own all Rotherham, we are all Rotherham.’
One of the victims said in court: ‘They were really chatty and would drive round in Subarus, three or four in a car. They would say “Come here sexy”.’
Sageer, who has young children, was the ringleader, playing a key role in ‘befriending young girls’ who were then ‘ passed to his friends, elder brothers, and associates’. Arshid, 40, known as ‘Mad Ash’, is said to have fathered up to 18 chil-
‘Cynical targeting of children’
dren by his mid-20s and impregnated seven of his teenage victims, but did not know their names.
Many more underage victims became pregnant by the married man and underwent abortions.
The serial rapist, who is now severely disabled after he was shot in the stomach in 2005, had even asked about how to expand his family using IVF fertility treatment with his 22-year-old wife Fatima.
The court in Sageer’s trial heard how the gang’s 13-year-old victim, now a 27-year- old mother with a young son, was ‘subjected to acts of a degrading and violent nature’.
On one occasion she was forced to perform a sex act on five males as she was locked away in a flat. She lost her virginity during the first savage attack by Sageer in the same alleyway he used for other rape attempts.
This week she said justice should have come 13 years ago and has demanded an apology from South Yorkshire police.
After one rape she saved the blue jeans, coat and black trousers she was wearing at the time but she said police lost them, so there was no DNA evidence.
She once claimed a detective told her: ‘We just think it is little white slappers running around with Asians.’ The 27-year- old had told police, her MP and former Home Secretary David Blunkett in April 2003 of the attacks, but the allegations were dropped after men threatened to burn down her family home and gang-rape her mother.
A report into the scandal, published in 2014, estimated that 1,400 underage girls were raped, sexually abused and, in some cases, forced into prostitution, usually by gangs of British-Pakistani men who were much older.
Anne Longfield, Children’s Commissioner for England, said yesterday: ‘These were terrible offences involving the cynical targeting of children. These men evaded justice for far too long.’