Why did authorities more for victims like
THE daughter of a murdered Telford abuse victim last night revealed her shock at the contents of the report. Tasnim Lowe, 23, asked: “How can anyone in authority do this when they have their own daughters?”
Tasnim survived a fire set off by dad Azhar Ali Mehmood, then 25, which killed her mum Lucy – 16 and pregnant – her grandmother Eileen, 49, and 17-year-old aunt Sarah.
Then just 16 months old, she only survived because he carried her out of the house and placed her under a tree in the garden.
Mehmood, a cabbie in Telford, was jailed following the fire in August 2000 for a minimum of 18 years for murdering Lucy and her family, and is still behind bars after being denied parole in 2020. But he has never faced sexual abuse charges despite meeting Lucy at 13 and getting her pregnant at 14.
Tasnim said: “The scale of abuse is disgusting and shocking. On my mum, the focus of the authorities was, ‘Why isn’t she in school?’ rather than, ‘Why is this child having babies?’ That’s what shocked me the most. How could you treat a person like that?”
The Sunday Mirror revealed four years ago that Lucy’s murder was one of several deaths linked to a massive child sexual exploitation scandal spanning four decades.
We estimated there could be 1,000 victims in the Shropshire town and were told by the authorities we’d made the scale of abuse up.
But inquiry chair Tom Crowther QC this week backed our findings.
He said: “Without the Mirror’s reporting, the truth about Telford would still be buried. It was fundamental in the process which led to this report.”
It found that the triple murder inquiry involving Lucy’s family was given a “raft of evidence” that she was being sexually exploited but officers “failed” her. The report also revealed that the council’s safeguarding team “took a non-interventionist role, and waited for the family to request help or actively seek intervention”.
Yet police in
Telford began to
If it wasn’t for the Sunday Mirror I would never have found out the whole truth TASNIM LOWE DAUGHTER OF LUCY, WHO WAS KILLED IN FIRE
investigation “into how this could have happened” and a selfreferral to the Independent Office for Police Conduct.
“There needs to be a referral to the IOPC in the same way South
Yorkshire police referred itself in Rotherham,” he said.
Mr Greenwood said West Mercia Police could owe thousands of pounds in compensation. “I would say on
average you’d see with actions against the police for this kind of failure are human rights claims,” he said. “The value of those tends to be around £20,000 depending on the severity.”