Eight Charged Over South Wales Rape Gang Abuse
Gwent Police have charged eight men over alleged child sexual offences against children in South Wales, spanning 1985 to 1996.
Every one of these men is presumed innocent, and nothing in this piece changes that.
The names: Shafaq Mohammed, 58. Syed Mohammed Ashan Taqvi, 65. Mohammed Sheikh Abdul Hannan, 54. Kevin Lawrence, 54. Sheikh Mohammed Tahir Ullah, 73. Aminur Rahman Chowdhury, 58. Shakeel Babur, 58. Murad Ali, 57.
The gang is alleged to have operated in Newport, Abergavenny, Swansea, with prosecutors saying there are links further afield still being worked out. The case goes to court now.
Most people will scroll past this as just another historic case. They should not, and here's why.
The alleged offending starts in 1985. The national inquiry's own timeframe starts in 1996. That's eleven years of this case sitting outside the period the inquiry has agreed to look at, and it's happening in one of the first major prosecutions announced since the inquiry opened its doors.
And we've learned this the hard way, over and over, in town after town. Where there's one gang, there's usually many more. Oldham taught us that. Rochdale, Rotherham and Birmingham taught us that. Every single time one of these cases gets prosecuted, it turns out to be a single thread pulled from something far bigger that nobody wanted to look at directly. Eight men charged today doesn't mean eight men is the whole picture. It never is.
The years that matter in cases like this are never the last ones. They're the first ones. The moment a child said something to an adult and that adult decided what to do about it, or didn't. Whether that was a police officer, a social worker, a teacher, doesn't much matter. What matters is that none of it gets built in a year. It takes a decade to bed in. Sometimes two.
So if these charges hold up in court, whatever went wrong institutionally around the earliest victims in this case happened almost entirely in years the national inquiry has already ruled outside its scope.
We were told this inquiry exists to drag institutional failure into daylight. Here's a case alleging exactly that kind of failure, starting eleven years before the inquiry's self imposed starting point. So which is it. Does the inquiry follow the failure back to where it actually started, or does it just inherit the case at the point its own paperwork happens to switch on.
For 8 years I've exposed how politicians and police covered up the gang rape of working-class White girls by Pakistani grooming gangs. I, with the support of the people of Oldham, led the campaign that forced the National Inquiry. Now, with your help, we will force this inquiry to a place it does not want to go.
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Nobody has told us yet. That's the point.
The courts will decide guilt or innocence, and that is exactly where that decision belongs. But the national inquiry has a separate question in front of it now, whether it wants it or not. You can't say you're examining institutional failure and then rule out the exact years that failure was forming.
Over the next few weeks I'm going through what has actually been happening in Wales, not just this charge sheet but the pattern behind it. Who knew what, when, and which authorities had the chance to stop this years before 1996 ever became relevant. South Wales hasn't had the scrutiny that Rotherham or Oldham or Telford had, and that silence has never once meant nothing was going on. It's meant the opposite. I'll be laying out exactly what I've found.
I’m Raja Miah MBE. For nearly eight years, I have led a campaign that exposed how senior Labour politicians helped protect Pakistani rape gangs. The people of my town helped force the national inquiry.
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