Another Rochdale Rape Gang Trial Goes Wrong

Another Collapse, Another Cover-Up

Another grooming gang trial in Greater Manchester has collapsed. Once again, the explanation offered to the public is two words. Legal reasons.

On 11 December, inside Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court, a jury that had been hearing evidence for weeks was suddenly dismissed. Six men stood accused of raping and exploiting vulnerable schoolgirls in Rochdale in the early 2000s. The prosecution had already opened its case. Recorded police interviews had been played. Witnesses had been called. And then, without warning, Judge Matthew Corbett-Jones told the jurors they were being discharged.

No further explanation. No transparency. No accountability. Just two words that have become the calling card of Greater Manchester's grooming gang failures. Legal reasons.

For those who have watched this region's handling of these cases for two decades, those words are depressingly familiar. They signal not just the collapse of a trial, but the collapse of public confidence in a system that repeatedly protects itself while abandoning victims.

This latest case should have been a moment of long-delayed justice. Instead, it became another reminder of how deep the institutional rot runs.

The Era of Abandoned Children

The six defendants - Tahir Rashid, Mohammed Saleem, Sucklane Shah, Itfaq Hussain, Arshad Mohammed, and Amjad Mahmood - faced allegations involving two teenage schoolgirls between 2003 and 2006, with additional charges dating back to the late 1980s. All denied wrongdoing.

These alleged offences occurred when Greater Manchester Police and local councils were already receiving reports of organised child sexual exploitation in Rochdale. This was the era in which children were dismissed as making choices, officers were told not to pursue so-called lifestyle victims, and institutions that would later become synonymous with the grooming scandal.

Decades later, those abandoned children stepped into court as adults, facing their alleged abusers, believing the justice system would finally hear them. One complainant, Girl C, told police she was 14 when defendant Tahir Rashid gave her vodka and raped her. She described missing school, taking drugs, spending time around the local snooker hall where predators circle vulnerable children the moment they know no one will protect them.

In court, Girl C faced the ordeal that awaits every grooming gang victim. Defence barristers systematically attacked her credibility, suggesting her account was a "figment of your imagination" and that she had "got it completely wrong" about the identity of her alleged attackers. When told her testimony was "simply not true", she repeatedly responded with quiet determination. "It's true." "We did." "No, there was."

For weeks, she endured the ritualised dismantling of her credibility that characterises these trials. She stood firm against lawyers paid to portray her as confused, mistaken, or lying. And then, with no explanation offered to her or the public, it all stopped.

The picture could not be clearer. Prosecutors said the two schoolgirls were "easy prey", targeted because they were already lost in the cracks the authorities had created. And then, mid-trial, everything stopped.

A System Built to Fail

When a judge halts a trial mid-course and dismisses a jury, it is never trivial. It almost always means evidence has been mishandled, disclosure failures have compromised fairness, or a legal argument has exposed fatal flaws in case preparation. A single undisclosed document can collapse a case that took victims decades to gather the courage to report.

But this collapse is not an anomaly. It is part of a long, painful pattern that defines Greater Manchester's approach to grooming gang cases. Operation Augusta collapsed because of withheld evidence and ignored children. The Oldham Assurance Review revealed victims known to services, yet no action was taken, and intelligence was ignored, lost or buried. Even the Mayor's inquiries was forced to publish evidence of repeated that police error, poor record-keeping, and flawed investigations that undermined cases long before they reached a courtroom.

Operation Lytton, the force's long-running investigation into historic exploitation in Rochdale that encompasses this trial, is itself a response to these historical failings. The same failings that allowed exploitation to continue unchecked from the 1990s through the 2000s.

The phrase "for legal reasons" has become a legal curtain used to hide the mess behind it. Each investigation ends with the same two conclusions. The children told the truth, and the authorities did not act on it.

This is the context in which this trial collapsed. Not a clean, self-contained legal process, but the continuation of decades-long failure that keeps resurfacing because the root causes were never addressed.

What Collapsed Trials Really Achieve

A retrial will likely be scheduled. The victims will be asked to give evidence again. They will relive their trauma and wait yet again for justice that keeps slipping away.

Collapsed trials achieve one thing. Police failures stay buried. Disclosure problems remain undisclosed. Mismanaged investigations are never examined in public. Officers responsible for mistakes are shielded from scrutiny. No politician has to answer difficult questions. The public is expected to accept the official line.

Officials will frame this as an isolated misfortune. But the people of Rochdale, Oldham, and wider Greater Manchester know better. They have lived through children dismissed as unreliable, social workers begging police to take action, intelligence "mislaid" or never acted upon, and a system that looked the other way.

When a judge halts a trial that has been running since October, it does not feel like an isolated legal event. It feels like institutional rot seeping upwards from decades-old decisions.

The Questions Nobody Wants Asked

This collapse raises a question the system does not want asked. What went wrong this time? Was it evidence mishandled? Was it disclosure failures again? Was a key file missing, incomplete, or flawed? Was new material discovered too late? Was something uncovered that, if aired publicly, would embarrass GMP or the CPS?

These are not wild speculations. They are the precise failures recorded in every previous inquiry into grooming gang cases in Greater Manchester. The public is not unreasonable for asking whether those same failures have just derailed another trial. The truth is withheld under the guise of "legal reasons". But history teaches us that when authorities suppress the truth, it is always to protect themselves.

The Human Cost of Institutional Failure

For the victims, the consequences are not abstract. A collapsed trial means they must return to court, relive their trauma, and endure months more uncertainty with their healing suspended in limbo. For them, this is not about "legal reasons". It is about whether justice will ever come at all.

Rochdale has already endured the shame of being told that its children were failed by those meant to protect them. This collapse reinforces a belief now deeply rooted in the community. The system will always protect itself before it protects children.

Every collapsed grooming gang trial leaves behind a silence. A gap where the truth should be. A void filled with official language designed to deflect scrutiny and maintain control.

How many more victims must come forward, how many more trials must collapse, before the British state confronts the truth it has spent decades avoiding?

If the system will not tell the truth, the public will drag it into the light.

I am Raja Miah. For seven years, I led a small team that exposed how politicians protected the rape gangs.

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