Bradford Council Helped A Rapist Marry His Child Victim. And Then Paid His Family To Enslave Her.
Everything below comes from Bradford's own commissioned review, its appendices, and the criminal courts. The scandal is not what they found. It is what happened after they found it.
Yesterday I told you that nobody came for Anna. That the investigation running in her district never found her. I have now read every page of the review Bradford commissioned into itself, and every page of its appendices, and I owe you a correction. Nobody needed to find Anna. They had her from the beginning.
- Her mother reported her in 2002.
- The council's specialist project held her case file.
- The police held intelligence on the man abusing her.
She was never lost. Every stage of what happened to her was minuted and reviewed, by name, while it happened.
What follows is their own record of what they did with her.
The review was carried out by Clare Hyde MBE, commissioned in April 2019 after the Fiona Goddard convictions, published in July 2021. It examined five children. When it appeared, the police, the council and the health partnership all apologised, then spent four years using it as the reason no full inquiry was needed.
Oddly, the report they relied upon for years has itself become remarkably difficult for the public to find. Go and try. The press release announcing it is still up. The document behind it is another matter. It makes no difference. I hold copies of both the review and its appendices, and by the end of this article you will understand why they would rather you didn't.
One of the five children is Anna. The review uses that name, and the courts kept it. The child in Case 1 and the woman whose thirteen rapists have now been convicted are the same person.
Nothing below is my allegation. It comes from their documents and from the criminal courts. Read it carefully, and every time you stop believing it, remember where it comes from.
They Knew From The First Year
In July 2002 Anna's mother told Children's Social Care that her daughter was getting into cars with males and staying out all night. Anna was fourteen that month. A month earlier, the council had removed her from her Child Protection Plan, on the recorded grounds that she refused to cooperate with her new social worker. A child was taken off child protection because the professional found her difficult. It took a challenge from Education Bradford to get the decision overturned.
That November she was referred to a project called Streets and Lanes, a specialist service for "children abused through prostitution". Understand what that name means. Bradford had run one of the first projects of its kind in the country since 1994. By the time Anna walked through its doors, this district had eight years of institutional expertise in exactly the crime being committed against her. In December 2002 she was placed in a children's home, and over the months that followed she went missing more than seventy times.
She told them everything. Throughout her time with the project, Anna made frequent disclosures of sexual abuse and coercion, including rapes, suffered while missing from the home. Not one disclosure was passed on. None of it reached the police or her social workers. The project's policy offered service users complete confidentiality, and that policy had been developed in partnership with the local authority.
The council helped design the confidentiality rules under which its own specialist project withheld a child's rape disclosures from the council. Her courage went into a filing cabinet the system had built to contain it.
The Police Wrote The Word Pimp
In February 2003 Anna returned to the children's home and reported that someone had tried to rape her. Police records show no investigation beyond the initial interview. The man she called her boyfriend appears in the records of that month as a taxi controller, variously aged between 18 and 27, suspected of dealing crack cocaine.
Then, on 11 March 2003, a West Yorkshire Police intelligence log recorded that Anna and another fourteen-year-old from the home had been driven to a semi-derelict house where a group of males plied them with alcohol and tried to undress them against their will. The girls fought their way out and Anna called the police herself.
The log records concerns that the girls were being groomed for prostitution. It records that the man Anna called her boyfriend was about thirty years old, co-owner of a taxi firm with his uncle. And it records the officers' belief that he was not her boyfriend but her "pimp".
West Yorkshire Police shared that log with nobody, not Children's Social Care, not any partner agency, and filed it. In March 2003 the force held a written assessment that a thirty-year-old man was pimping a fourteen-year-old child in council care, and did nothing with it.
Four months later there was a wedding.
Their Own Review Puts a Social Worker at the Wedding
First, in June 2003, came something almost stranger than the wedding. Anna's official looked-after child review recorded that she was "engaged" and had converted to Islam, and the man himself attended the meeting as an invited participant, with the reviewing officer recording that his invitation acknowledged the significance of the relationship. Her abuser sat in her statutory care review at the council's own table.
The review wraps that man in quotation marks, "boyfriend", then "husband", and redacts everything else. The courts have removed the redaction. He is Raja Zulqurnean, convicted in January 2025 of raping and indecently assaulting Anna, now serving twenty-three years after the Court of Appeal ruled his original eighteen unduly lenient. The BBC reported that he married Anna in an Islamic wedding ceremony when she was just fifteen. He was around twenty-two.
Emma Glasbey and Jennifer Smith
In July 2003 Anna told her project worker about the Nikah. The review's finding is that there appears to have been collusion by her Children's Social Care social worker, who allegedly attended the ceremony and assessed that her marriage was likely to reduce the risks Anna ran when she went missing. Elsewhere the review drops the hedge entirely and states that her social worker attended, and that professionals thereafter referred to Zulqurnean as her "husband" and his parents as her "in-laws".
Marriage to a rapist, entered into the professional record as a protective factor.
And here is the detail that shows the institution understood precisely what it was legitimising. In January 2004 the council recorded that Social Care had refused consent for the marriage because of Anna's age. They knew the marriage was unlawful and wrote that knowledge into the file. Their own employee had attended it anyway, and the arrangement it created was allowed to stand.
Then They Paid His Family to Keep Her
By November 2003 Anna was pregnant. At her December care review, the record states she wished to be fostered by Zulqurnean's family, states that this was unacceptable because she was fifteen, and notes that she had taken an overdose since the previous review. The council refused, on the record, a pregnant and suicidal fifteen-year-old's request to be housed by her abuser's family. Days later she was living there.
As a foster child. No record of any assessment or approval process exists in the council's files. The reviewer wrote that it is hard to understand how the decision can have been made.
A council officer's note from that autumn offers a clue. It records that while it was difficult to see how the service could approve the arrangement, it might be possible "not to try too hard to return her" to the children's home.
Only in January was a student social worker tasked with assessing the placement, after the fact. The placement even carried a written condition that no sexual contact take place between Anna and the man whose child she was already carrying.
And the family was paid a fostering allowance.
Bradford Council paid Raja Zulqurnean's parents to keep the child he was raping, for a placement its own review meeting had called unacceptable days before it began.
What that household was, the record also shows. She was not allowed out unaccompanied, sometimes not at all. She was kept from her GP and from any education. In her first trimester Zulqurnean beat her so severely she suffered a serious head injury and was taken to hospital by ambulance, and she reported the assault as a hate crime because she was too frightened to say who had done it. Hold that beside what the jury heard two decades later, that he struck her head with an iron and instructed her to give the hospital a false account. She twice told her project worker he was hitting her. No safeguarding response followed.
She described her role in the household to the reviewer, serving her husband and his extended family, in her words, "somewhat like a maid", and said she feared an honour-based killing if she left. The review states her treatment amounted to what would now be recognised as "domestic slavery".
In April 2004 the family threw her out, pregnant, and she spent the rest of her pregnancy in a mouse-infested bedsit the council funded without inspecting. She gave birth prematurely at 35 weeks. That December her social worker took her and her baby to a women's refuge after another assault. She was still a child in care. At sixteen she was pregnant again.
The stories that expose them are the stories they tried and failed to imprison me for sharing.
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Millions now know the truth of the rape gangs, and who covered up what took place.
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The Courts Have Proven Every Word
The review also records what the chronologies never captured, that throughout her time in care Anna was being abused by dozens of adult males, some known to Zulqurnean, and that more than twenty arrests had been made by the time of publication.
Read that again. In July 2021 Bradford published, in its own commissioned review, that a live criminal investigation into the mass abuse of a child in its care was underway. Yet for the next four years its leaders repeatedly argued that no further inquiry was needed, insisting another inquiry would be "not of additional value."
The courts have since put names to the dozens. Thirteen men have now been convicted of abusing Anna, across five trials spanning January 2025 to July 2026, and they deserve to be listed in one place, because no newspaper has yet done it.
These are men in their forties today, which made them grown men in their twenties, some approaching thirty, when Anna was between thirteen and fifteen years old. The review's chronology recorded her "boyfriend" as anywhere between 18 and 27 and the man in the police intelligence log as around thirty, and the agencies watching her wrote those numbers down next to her age without acting on the gap. A child of the state, a queue of adult men, and the nine sentenced so far carry 104 years between them with four more sentences still to come.
And notice what nobody has ever told the public. How these thirteen men knew each other.
The review records that some were known to Zulqurnean, and there the public record ends. Five criminal trials required the prosecution to hold a theory of how this network operated, who connected whom, and what passed between them, and not one word of it has ever been reported. Thirteen convictions, one child, and the shape of the thing has never been shown to the people of Bradford. That is a question for the sentencing hearings still to come, and it is a question the national inquiry must answer when it reaches this district, because the difference between a gang and a market in children is the difference between a crime and an economy.
The jury heard that Zulqurnean locked Anna in properties and at times in a cellar, deprived her of food, schooling and medical care, dictated how she dressed, went through her phone, cut her off from her family and took her money. The review recorded a girl kept indoors, denied her GP and any education, made to cook and clean. The two documents describe the same captivity, one written by a safeguarding reviewer in 2021, one proven to a jury in 2025.
Every official who touched Anna's case sits under those verdicts. So does every official who read the review in 2021 and decided it changed nothing.
They Used the Confession as a Shield
When campaigners and politicians demanded a full independent inquiry into exploitation across the district, the answer was always the same. Bradford had already been reviewed. Susan Hinchcliffe said an inquiry would "not be of additional value". The Partnership said it was unlikely to provide new learning.
And in October 2021, three months after publication, Anna's own words were read into Hansard, asking why, if Rotherham had a full inquiry, it was being denied to the thousands of children in Bradford. The child at the centre of the council's own review was publicly begging for the inquiry the council was using her review to refuse.
In January 2025 Labour councillors voted an inquiry down. Two months after their final refusal, Casey ended the argument over their heads, and following Labour losing control of Bradford Council, the city now sits in the first tranche of the national inquiry whether its considered value for money or not.
Through all of it, one thing has never happened. The social worker at the wedding has never been publicly named. The officer who filed the pimp intelligence and shared it with nobody has never been publicly named. Whoever placed a pregnant child with her abuser's family, without assessment, against the recorded conclusion of her own review, has never been publicly named. No misconduct proceedings have ever been disclosed.
The men have 104 years between them so far. The professionals have received nothing at all.
Bradford has spent twenty years refusing to answer one question. How many children?
Rotherham counted. Bradford never has. Tomorrow, in the final part, I am going to show you exactly how hard they have worked to avoid counting, who refused, in their own words, and why.
Imagine the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom being compelled to appear before a national statutory inquiry, placed under oath and required to answer for his own actions during the cover up of the Pakistani rape gangs.
You don't have to imagine it. You just have to help me make it happen.
For eight years I have exposed how politicians, police and public bodies failed working class White girls who were systematically raped by Pakistani grooming gangs. Together, with the support of the people of Oldham, we forced the Government to concede a National Statutory Inquiry after years of resistance.
Now the harder fight begins.
Andy Burnham is no longer the Mayor of Greater Manchester. He is the Prime Minister. That does not place him beyond scrutiny. If anything, it makes scrutiny more important than ever.
As Mayor, Burnham commissioned a series of Assurance Reviews across Greater Manchester, including one in my hometown of Oldham. They were presented as a search for the truth. They were nothing of the sort. They were cover ups of cover ups that allowed those responsible to escape proper accountability. Don't take my word for it. Even former Greater Manchester Police detective Maggie Oliver has publicly criticised the process.
Despite those efforts, we forced a National Inquiry. Now Burnham and others are attempting to rewrite the history of what happened under their watch.
At present, the inquiry has made no commitment to examine Burnham's own role or the decisions taken during his time as Mayor. That must change before the Oldham investigations begin.
The pressure to protect a serving Prime Minister will be immense. The institutions that failed these girls will have every incentive to avoid putting the country's most powerful politician under oath. Much of the media will once again find reasons to look the other way.
That is why this campaign cannot slow down now. For too long this has been a one man operation. It needs to become something much bigger. We need the resources to build a genuinely independent investigative organisation with:
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- Video production that takes our investigations to millions more people.
- Research support so no lead is left unexplored.
- Live events to educate, organise and train others.
- The resources to investigate, travel and expose institutional failure wherever it is found.
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Eight years ago they said we would never force the government to admit these were racially motivated crimes. They were wrong.
They then said there would never be a national inquiry. They were wrong.
The same people now tell us that powerful politicians will never answer for what they did. What say you?
Raja Miah MBE