GROOMING GANGS, LABOUR POLITICS AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT: THE CONNECTIONS NEVER MAPPED
The criminal investigations identified the offenders. They never systematically examined the family, political, council and community networks surrounding them.
PART 5.
Part 4 ended on the question everything before it had been leading towards.
Do the men who raped the girls belong to the same structure as the men who deliver the votes, or were two separate things simply happening in the same towns?
Nobody has ever checked, and I cannot compel the answer. I have no warrants, no production orders, no power to put a witness on oath. What I can do is start the checking myself, from the public record, and show you what I found.
FALCONE DID NOT BELIEVE. HE CHECKED.
When Buscetta talked, Falcone did not take his word for the structure. He tested it, thread by thread, three thousand six hundred bank cheques traced through the Sicilian banking system until the association that swore it did not exist was visible on paper. The evidence had been sitting in the banks all along. Nobody before him had been required to connect it.
The discipline of that method matters as much as the result, and I am adopting it in full. I do not start with a theory and collect what supports it. I define the checks first, run them consistently, and let the records say whether the connections exist. So before I touch a single name, here is the test.
THE NETWORK TEST
This is my test. It has no official standing, and it needs none, because every element of it is ordinary investigative practice that any force in the country could have applied at any point in the last thirty years. The test takes every convicted rape gang offender and every facilitator and associate the operations identified, the ninety-seven of Augusta among them, and runs six checks against each name.
KINSHIP. Who is related to whom, by blood, by marriage, through the extended family?
PLACE. Which addresses recur, the homes, the streets, the takeaways, the taxi offices?
ORGANISATIONS. Which businesses, mosques, community groups, charities and employers hold the same names?
POLITICS. Who campaigns, who selects, who represents, who belongs?
PUBLIC POWER. Who holds the council jobs, the licences, the grants, the contracts, the planning decisions, the official positions?
PROTECTION. Who knew, who intervened, and what happened each time concerns were raised?
I do not begin by asking whether the biraderi exists. I run the checks, and if the same organisation is there, the records will draw it for me. The men have already told us where to look, because they never respected the borough boundaries and the investigations always did.
The 2012 Rochdale gang was men from Rochdale and Oldham, and Kasir Bashir traded on Rochdale market while living in Oldham. Operation Earby, the live investigation, covers Rochdale and Oldham together, because the police finally conceded what the men had known all along, that it was one patch.
On 30 April last year Operation Sherwood, an operation carrying Oldham's name, arrested three men in Bolton, Rochdale and Oldham, and five weeks later it arrested five more in Oldham, Tameside and Manchester. One operation, eight arrests, five boroughs, five weeks.
In July three men were charged over offences in Bury, and they come from Bury, Bolton and Accrington, which is not even in Greater Manchester. And the girl from Halifax you met in Part 1 was raped by twenty-five men drawn from seven towns.
Every one of the six checks has to follow names across borough lines, because that is where the men went. The assurance reviews stopped at the edge of a single borough and the criminal operations prosecuted one town at a time, so the machinery Britain built could never have run this test even if it had wanted to. So let us run it, on the most notorious name in the entire file.
START WITH SHABIR AHMED
Oldham Chronicle
The criminal file first, because it is the one everybody knows. Shabir Ahmed, the ringleader of the 2012 Rochdale trial, the man who made his victims call him Daddy. In May 2012 he was convicted of two rapes, aiding and abetting rape, sexual assault and trafficking for sexual exploitation, and in June 2012 of thirty further rapes. Nineteen years at the first trial, twenty-two at the second.
That file has been public for fourteen years. Now the same six checks run against the same man.
KINSHIP
This is where my public-record exercise stops. I cannot responsibly establish Ahmed's extended family network from the material available to me, and an inquiry with compulsory powers can. That gap belongs in the record, because the first check on the first name already needs powers nobody outside the state possesses.
PLACE
He was not a Rochdale man. He lived in Oldham and offended through the Rochdale network, across the same boundary the investigations never crossed. At least one of his associate gang members was also from Oldham. The takeaway where some of the rapes took place and where children were sold from was owned by a politician from Oldham. Yet to this day, they are known as the Rochdale Grooming Gang.
ORGANISATIONS
He was seconded to the Oldham Pakistani Community Centre, a posting that took him out of the Civic Centre and put him across the desk from families in difficulty, and he sat as a director of the local Citizens Advice Bureau.
POLITICS
He was a member of the Labour Party, and that is not my allegation. It is the recorded answer of the Leader of Oldham Council in her own chamber on 27 June 2022, describing him as "a member and... active in the local Labour Party" in the relevant period.
PUBLIC POWER
He worked for Oldham Council from 1988 until 2006, eighteen years on the public payroll as a welfare rights officer, in a role the assurance review itself says would potentially have brought him into contact with a range of vulnerable adults and their children.
PROTECTION
The record answers this one four times over, and the answer needs a section of its own. Ahmed was repeatedly protected from prosecution.
There it is. That is the first join, and it is not a photograph, not somebody's allegation, not a friend of a friend. It is one named man established in both records, the convicted ringleader in the criminal file, and the council employee, community worker and active Labour member in the civic and political file. The public did not see those files laid side by side until the 2022 assurance review, a decade after his conviction.
Raja Miah
NOW RUN THE PROTECTION CHECK
The sixth check asks what happened each time the state was handed a reason to look at him, and the official record answers it, date by date.
In 2005 Greater Manchester Police were told of a serious allegation of child sexual abuse by Ahmed, and were made aware he had contact with a young child outside Oldham. The force did not submit a crime report, which breached the crime recording standard then in force. It did not tell the local authority responsible for that child, and it did not tell Oldham Council. No risk assessment, no referral, no strategy discussion, no Section 47 investigation.
In 2008, when the allegations against him were discussed in Rochdale, neither Rochdale Borough Council nor GMP informed Oldham. When the probation service notified Oldham Council that its former officer had been charged with sexual assault, the council took no action.
And in 2012, when a young woman came forward to say she had been abused by Ahmed during his years as a welfare rights officer, children's social care closed her case within days, without any assessment.
The review team found serious failings in how both the council and the force investigated concerns about him, and concluded that his later abuse could have been prevented if the earlier behaviour had been addressed.
The council's answers deserve to be carried here in full, because the finding survives them.
Then Leader, Amanda Chadderton told the chamber that the failings around Offender A were indefensible, and also that there is no evidence the council knew he had committed crimes while it employed him, that it was not informed of allegations until two years after he left, that he was not protected from investigation by officers or politicians, that no reference was provided, and that it was the council itself that told the reviewers he had worked there.
Every one of those statements can be true, and the record above still stands. Four separate opportunities for the state to act on one man, and not one of them produced the response the circumstances demanded.
I am not going to tell you that proves protection, because it does not, and this series does not outrun its evidence. What made the same institutional failure recur around the same man is a question with a short list of possible answers, incompetence, institutional fear, deference to community sensitivities, influence, deliberate protection, or some combination of them, and every answer on that list is serious.
More than twenty years after the first documented opportunity to act on Ahmed, nobody with compulsory powers has been required to establish which. And now, despite so many other rape gang members now released, they want this man on a plane and deported to Pakistan.
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THE SECOND APPLICATION
A test is only a test if it works somewhere else, so the second application runs forty miles east, in the capital town of the scandal. Jahangir Akhtar was the Labour deputy leader of Rotherham Council and vice-chair of the South Yorkshire Police and Crime Panel, the body that existed to scrutinise the force.
He is a relative of the Hussain brothers, four of whom took ninety-eight years between them for fifty-three child sex offences, Arshid, the ringleader, among them, and he lived a few doors from the family home. The newspapers describe him as 'a distant relative', but as anyone in the Pakistani community will tell you, a distant relative by Western standards is close kin by theirs.
Sam Cooper
In 2013 he resigned after The Times reported allegations that he had been involved in an arrangement under which Arshid Hussain returned a missing girl to police at a petrol station on the understanding he would not be arrested, and in 2016 that girl, by then a woman of thirty who had been made pregnant by Hussain at fifteen, repeated the allegation in evidence at Sheffield Crown Court.
Adele Forrest
When the council later introduced a fit and proper person test for taxi drivers, he lost his licence under it, and the government's own inspection of Rotherham recorded the concerns that swirled around influence, licensing and the council's culture.
The second application produces another cluster immediately, kinship, politics and public power crossing on one man in the town with fourteen hundred victims. Then it produces a protection allegation serious enough to be heard in a criminal court, which Akhtar has always denied and which a police investigation did not substantiate. That contrary finding gets recorded too, exactly as it stands.
The Network Test is not a machine for turning association into guilt, and if police investigated a specific allegation and did not substantiate it, that belongs in the record just as surely as the allegation itself. But clearing one man of one alleged intervention does not answer the network question. Where is the wider kinship analysis of that town? Where is the licensing map? Where are the political and business cross-references? Nobody has ever produced them, for Rotherham or for anywhere else.
THERE IS ONE OTHER NAME I PUT THROUGH THE PROTECTION TEST
That name is mine. In August 2019, while the people of Oldham were demanding answers about the rape of children, Greater Manchester Police and Oldham Council stood up a joint Gold Command operation called Operation Hexagon.
Raja Miah
Eight officers dawn raided my home, and I was one of its referrals to the Crown Prosecution Service. In December 2020 the force admitted that its referrals to the CPS under Hexagon contained no child sexual exploitation offences at all.
A Gold Command operation created while a town was demanding answers about the rape of children generated referrals to prosecutors, and not one of those referrals contained a child sexual exploitation offence.
That is all I am going to say about Hexagon here, because it belongs to the next question, not this one. This part asks who crossed the files. Part 6 asks what the institutions did when somebody tried to cross them, and Hexagon is Part 6's evidence, alongside everything else the machinery did in those years.
THIS IS WHERE MY POWERS END AND THE NATIONAL INQUIRY'S BEGIN
The remaining checks need what I do not have.
- Who recruited Ahmed to the council?
- Who placed him at the Pakistani Community Centre?
- Who approved the arrangement and who supervised it?
- Who worked beside him there for eighteen years, and who else held positions in the organisations that held him?
- Which families in difficulty passed across his welfare desk, and did any of their daughters appear later in any operation's victim list?
- Who are his relatives, and where do their names appear in the party records and the candidate lists of my town?
- Which businesses did his co-defendants run, the taxis and takeaways of the trial record, and who licensed them?
- One more question belongs here, and it is the obvious one. When investigators built the Rochdale prosecution, did anybody cross-reference Ahmed's victims and associates against the eighteen years of records generated by his public and community work? If the answer is yes, that analysis exists and can be produced. If the answer is no, then the cross-reference was never done, and Part 6 asks why.
At that same council meeting of 27 June 2022, Amanda Chadderton, then leader L was asked in public session to name the colleagues sat beside her who knew Shabir Ahmed, and she answered that Offender A "lived and worked in the borough". The names were never given, and I cannot compel them. The National Inquiry can.
RUN THE NETWORK TEST
This is what the National Inquiry must do, and I am going to state it precisely so that when the Inquiry eventually reports, everybody can see whether it did. Take every named perpetrator, facilitator and person of interest from Augusta, Stovewood, Clover, Span, Doublet, Lytton, Green Jacket, Sherwood, Earby and the other major operations, and cross-reference them against five groups of records.
PEOPLE. Kinship, household and the electoral registers.
MONEY. Businesses, property, grants and contracts.
POWER. Party membership, candidates, agents, council positions and licensing.
ORGANISATIONS. Mosques, community organisations, charities, taxi firms and takeaways.
STATE RESPONSE. Police intelligence, referrals, safeguarding records, complaints and interventions.
Then build the map.
Do not ask witnesses whether an organisation exists, build the map and see whether one appears. Falcone used thousands of banking checks to test and corroborate the structure put before him, and Britain can test this one the same way. Which names occur in more than one dataset? Which occur in three? Which occur in six? Which people connect otherwise separate clusters? And which officials appear, again and again, at the point where action stopped?
The test is capable of producing an answer I may not like. It may reveal one structure, several regional structures, interconnected family and political networks, partial connections, or no meaningful organisational relationship at all, and if that is the finding, it gets published and I will live with it. What is no longer defensible is refusing to perform the exercise.
ONE NAME WAS ENOUGH TO JUSTIFY THE INVESTIGATION
Part 4 asked whether the men in the rape files and the men in the political and civic files belong to the same structure. I cannot answer that from the public record alone, and nobody should pretend they can. What I can show is that the moment the files are placed beside each other, a name crosses them.
Shabir Ahmed is not an allegation. He is the first result, the convicted ringleader of the Rochdale trial who was also an Oldham Council employee for eighteen years, a welfare adviser working with families in difficulty, seconded into a community organisation, described by the council's own leader as active in the local Labour Party, and surrounded by repeated documented opportunities for police, councils and safeguarding agencies to act, none of which produced the protection the children required. That does not prove one organisation. It proves something much simpler, that the investigation is there to be done, and thirty years into this scandal, nobody has done it.
So why was it never done? Part 6 answers that.
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 described what happened in Oldham as 'nothing short of a cover up'.
Despite every effort to stop us, 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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Raja Miah MBE