UK plans legal changes to enable deportation of Rochdale grooming gang ringleader to Pakistan

London, July 10 (IANS) The UK government is expected to announce changes to legislation that currently prevents the deportation of the Rochdale grooming gang’s ringleader to Pakistan, according to local media reports. UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is considering whether the changes will be introduced through fast-tracked legislation or as an amendment to the Immigration and Asylum Bill.

Shabir Ahmed, the ringleader of a Rochdale grooming gang, who served 14 years for several rapes and sexual abuse, was released from prison last week. Despite having been stripped of his UK citizenship, Ahmed cannot be deported to Pakistan due to a 55-year-old loophole in the Immigration Act 1971, which protects people who arrived in the UK before 1973 and lived there for at least five years, UK-based Independent reported.

Victims, including one identified as “Ruby”, have expressed fear for their safety after Ahmed’s release and have urged government to make changes to the law to ensure grooming gang members can be deported, Independent reported.

Reportedly, Pakistan is refusing to accept Ahmed and has demanded the extradition of two political dissidents from the UK in exchange.

On July 2, Shabir Ahmed (73) was freed from prison despite three failed attempts to secure parole, the most recent being in October 2024. One document, linked to a previous review in 2023, shows Ahmed was considered a “high risk of sexual offending”, UK-based The Guardian reported.

One of his victims, Amber*, said she was feeling “physically sick” and not able to sleep as she considered the danger posed by Ahmed and his associates. Amber was one of about 50 girls who were sexually abused and trafficked by Ahmed and his contacts from about 2008.

In 2022, Ahmed was jailed for 22 years after being convicted of rape and sexual abuse charges spanning two separate trials, The Guardian reported. He was stripped of his UK citizenship after his convictions.

Earlier in June, a 219-page report released by a privately funded parliamentary inquiry into organised child sexual exploitation in the UK revealed that at least 250,000 girls and likely more were subjected to gang rape, trafficking, torture, and coerced pregnancy over several decades, with the perpetrators overwhelmingly being of Pakistani Muslim heritage and the enabling institutions overwhelmingly of the British state.

The Rape Gang Inquiry, chaired by Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe and led operationally by survivor and advocate Sammy Woodhouse, was funded by over 20,000 donors. It did not have statutory powers, however, it included testimony from survivors, whistleblowers, politicians, and experts across multiple public hearings, according to a report in US-based South Asian TV network Diya TV.

According to the report, the inquiry was started as the state and its institutions had “failed catastrophically over decades.” Police, social services, schools, the NHS, licensing authorities, and successive governments at local and national level allowed organised networks of men to operate with what the report termed as the “active or passive consent of the British state.” The report has included the first recorded case of Pakistani gang rape in UK in 1955, when four Bradford-based Pakistani men were charged with raping a 15-year-old girl from Middlesbrough.

“The 250,000 figure originates from a 2019 House of Lords statement by Lord Pearson of Rannoch, who extrapolated from the Jay Report’s findings in Rotherham — where at least 1,400 girls were abused between 1997 and 2013 — alongside comparable inquiries in Telford, Oxford, Rochdale, and elsewhere. The inquiry endorses this as a ‘conservative estimate,’ noting that the British state never systematically recorded the full scale of the abuse, that sexual violence of all kinds is typically under-reported, and that The Independent found nearly 19,000 children identified as sexual exploitation victims in England in a single year even amid institutional resistance to naming the problem,” the Diya TV report stated.

According to the inquiry, evidence of gang operations were found in at least 149 local authority districts in the UK. In court records and official inquiries, approximately 87 per cent of those convicted in group-based child sexual exploitation cases were Muslim names, it was reported.

–IANS

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