Jailed for 220 years, UK’s biggest grooming gang
MeMBeRS of Britain’s biggest Asian grooming gang have been jailed for a total of 220 years.
Vulnerable girls were befriended, plied with drink and drugs and raped by ‘wicked’ older men on a shocking scale in Huddersfield.
The former mill town joins Rotherham, Rochdale, Newcastle, Telford and Oxford on a list of notorious hotbeds of depravity and sex abuse.
The Huddersfield ringleader was Amere Dhaliwal, who was convicted of appalling offences against 11 girls, including 22 rapes. The 35-year-old Sikh and married father of two was jailed for life.
One victim told Leeds Crown Court she was raped during games of ‘truth or dare’ as other men watched and laughed. Other victims were sexually assaulted in cars, car parks, a snooker hall, a takeaway restaurant and a park.
Social services and police were either unable or unwilling to protect the girls as young as 11.
The abusers had sinister nicknames including Dracula, Chiller, Beastie and Bully.
Sajid Hussain, 33, who was sentenced to 17 years for rape, went on the run before the end of his trial and is wanted by police.
Until now, details of three trials at Leeds Crown Court, all involving defendants and victims from Huddersfield, have been the subject of a blanket reporting ban, which was overturned after an application from the media, including the Daily Mail.
Twenty defendants have been convicted and 16 of these sentenced to a minimum of 221 years for offences against 15 girls.
The trials involved more than 150 crimes between 2004 and 2011. All but two of the victims were white and the abusers were predominantly of Pakistani heritage. Some victims believed they were in genuine relationships and defied all attempts by their worried parents to stop them.
The girls would be passed around the older men to be raped and assaulted in cars and at house parties. Free drugs and drink made them defenceless. The scores of offences committed by the men included rapes, sex assaults, sexual activity with children, trafficking and supplying drugs.
The jury heard that Dhaliwal showered his child victims with attention, ‘manipulated and moulded them’ for his own sexual pleasure and pimped them out to other men at sex parties. He was convicted of 54 offences. Judge Geoffrey Marson, QC, told Dhaliwal: ‘Your treatment of these girls was inhuman.’
The judge added: ‘Girls would wake up naked or partially clothed, not knowing what had happened to them.’
Despite a clear pattern of behaviour, each victim suffered a different ordeal. Manzoor Hassan, 38, forced a handful of ecstasy tablets into the mouth of one girl.
The judge said the 13-year-old was found in the road incapacitated and later ‘drifting in and out of consciousness and crying’.
The men were not concerned about the girls being in care.
The court heard they bombarded a 12-year-old girl’s foster carers with phone calls ‘demanding that she is made available for sex’. This girl later had a son by a taxi driver abuser when she was 16.
Richard Wright, QC, prosecuting, told the jury that the authorities had let the victims down.
Home Secretary Sajid Javid tweeted: ‘These sick Asian paedophiles are finally facing justice.’