The Daily Mail UK
written by Arthur Martin and Inderdeep Bains
Tuesday May 14, 2013
Catastrophic failings by police and social services allowed a child sex ring to sexually torture girls as young as 11 for eight years.
Victims repeatedly told officers they had been raped or abused by the vicious and ‘medieval’ predators – but no action was taken.
Last night – after the abusers were convicted at the Old Bailey – the police and social services apologised for failing to answer the girls’ desperate pleas for help.
The gang groomed more than 50 vulnerable youngsters before selling them for sex around the country.
They used knives, cleavers and baseball bats to inflict severe pain on the girls for their twisted pleasure.
But a catalogue of golden opportunities to stop the abuse were missed from as early as May 2005.
Three of the girls who gave evidence at the trial were reported missing from residential care on 254 occasions. One went missing 126 times in 15 months.
Astonishingly, carers at the children’s homes – which were run by Oxfordshire County Council – just watched as the men collected the girls at night.
On one occasion, a manager refused to pay a 14-year-old victim’s taxi fare when she returned to her care home. The girl was then driven back to Oxford where she was raped.
Nine out of ten social workers in Oxford knew that girls were being groomed by Asian men, a school support worker told the court. Five girls were abused while in the care of county council social services.
The victims – aged 11 to 15 – were befriended with gifts of perfume, alcohol and drugs before being subjected to a ‘living hell’ of extreme physical and sexual violence for eight years.
Yesterday five men of Pakistani origin and two of Eritrean heritage were facing lengthy jail terms after being convicted of a string of crimes.
Their offences included 23 rapes, 15 rape conspiracy charges, nine charges of arranging child prostitution, five of internal trafficking for sexual exploitation and four of sexual activity with a child.
The case is the latest involving men of predominantly Asian origin picking up underage white girls for sex.
Members of a sex grooming gang in Rochdale were jailed for startlingly similar offences last year.
A serious case review is being carried out into why the sex gang in Oxford was able to operate for eight years.
Julie Siddiqi, of the Islamic Society of Britain and co-founder of the Community Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, said: ‘The damage these men have done and evil they have wrought will last a lifetime for their victims which can never be fully healed.
‘The men and those who sheltered them must now examine their consciences as they reflect on the terrible nature of their crimes. It is imperative that there is no hiding place for abuse or abusers within any of our communities.’
Jon Brown, of the NSPCC, said: ‘The Oxford grooming trial has been a grim reminder that even though we are living in the 21st century some people have retained medieval attitudes towards young girls.’
The men targeted girls from troubled upbringings and those playing truant.
They gave the girls large amounts of drugs including heroin and crack cocaine so that they would yield to their depraved demands.
At times the girls were so ‘wasted’ they ‘were barely aware of what was going on’, the court heard.
Men would travel to Oxford ‘by appointment’ from places including Bradford, Leeds, London and Slough and queue up in corridors of bedsits and hotels to abuse the girls for days at a time.
Sometimes the girls were taken outside Oxford where they were sold for £600 an hour.
The gang would threaten to kill them and their families if they refused to follow orders or tried to escape.
One victim, who was just 12 when she was groomed, regularly cut herself with a razor to ‘take away the hurt’.
She told her mother: ‘I may as well be dead.’
The missed opportunities started when a 12-year-old victim told police she had been sexually assaulted by Mohammed Karrar.
In fact, the girl had already been raped and sold for sex by Karrar, but she was too frightened to tell police about her full ordeal.
The following year three other victims told police that they had been raped and sexually abused by Asian men.
During a police interview, a 15-year-old told officers she was sexually abused by Akhtar Dogar for three days after running away from a children’s home in September 2006.
The victim, who was raped by the gang from the age of 12 and sold for sex, told police she was sick of being treated ‘like a piece of meat’.
She told police that she knew other girls were being abused because ‘I have seen them doing it to little girls in their uniforms’.
Dogar was interviewed but released without charge after claiming she had confused him with another man.
Police let him go despite the fact he had been caught with the same victim days earlier.
Two months later, another victim was spotted by a police officer running from a room in a downmarket Oxford guest house wearing only a towel after being beaten and raped.
The 14-year-old told them how the gang raped her, injected her with drugs, beat her and urinated over her.
No charges were brought against the gang because the victim was persuaded by another girl to withdraw the allegations.
In the same year a third victim, who was 14 at the time, told police that several Asian men had sex with her at a flat in Oxford.
She told them her true age and admitted that she had run away from a children’s home.
But she later told them she did not want to give evidence because she did not trust them to keep her safe.
Another girl felt brave enough to face her abusers in court, while others gave evidence from behind a curtain.
One of the victims described how she was even threatened with arrest for wasting police time when she tried to report the abuse.
Police broke up the sex ring during a series of co-ordinated dawn raids on homes in Oxford in March last year.
Operation Bullfinch identified 51 potential child victims and 30 suspects, 21 of whom were arrested.
Mohammed Karrar, 38, was found guilty of seven rapes, four counts of conspiracy to rape, two counts of arranging child prostitution, two counts of trafficking a child within the UK for sexual exploitation, assault of a child by penetration, using an instrument to procure a miscarriage and supplying heroin.
Bassam Karrar, 33, was found guilty of three rapes, three counts of conspiracy to rape, two counts of arranging child prostitution and trafficking a child for sexual exploitation.
Kamar Jamil, 27, was found guilty of five rapes, two counts of conspiracy to rape and arranging child prostitution. Akhtar Dogar, 32, was found guilty of five rapes, three counts of conspiracy to rape, two counts of arranging child prostitution and trafficking a child for sexual exploitation.
Anjum Dogar, 31, was found guilty of three rapes, three counts of conspiracy to rape, two counts of arranging child prostitution and trafficking a child for sexual exploitation.
Assad Hussain, 32, was found guilty of two counts of sexual activity with a child.
Zeeshan Ahmed, 27, was found guilty of two counts of sexual activity with a child.
They will be sentenced on June 14.
Detective Chief Superintendent Rob Mason said: ‘Thames Valley Police and Oxfordshire County Council social services deeply regret that this activity wasn’t identified sooner and that we were too reliant on victims supporting criminal proceedings, and that they suffered a terrible ordeal.’
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