Halifax Has Jailed Over Fifty Men For Child Rape. It Has Not Been Named By The National Inquiry. Reform Has The Power To Change This.
This Has Been Happening In Calderdale Since 2001. Nobody With Power Has Been Required To Explain It.
Six men from Halifax were sentenced at Bradford Crown Court today for raping and sexually abusing a girl who was thirteen years old when the abuse began.
48 Years in Total
- Mohammed Shehban received fourteen years for two rapes.
- Adal Manaf received eight years for rape.
- Imran Hussain received seven years for attempted rape.
- Amazar Ali received ten years for two counts of sexual activity with a child.
- Naveed Anjum received five and a half years for sexual activity with a child.
- Mohammed Adnan, Shehban's brother, received four and a half years for sexual assault.
- A seventh defendant was acquitted and an eighth produced a hung jury.
The offences took place across Calderdale between 2006 and 2009. The survivor did not come forward to police until 2019. A decade passed before anyone in authority knew her name. Her statement to the court described abuse that left her unable to trust anyone and still afraid, in 2026, that it will happen again.
The men were aged between twenty-two and thirty-seven when the abuse began. They gave her alcohol and drugs and told her she was special. The CPS specialist prosecutor described this at sentencing as manufactured intimacy, false affection used to make a thirteen-year-old girl compliant to rape. In many of the incidents she was under the influence of substances her abusers had supplied. The victim's own statement described men who had deliberately identified her vulnerability and used it. She said she could not see it at the time but can now.
Tony Earnshaw
Six adult men from Halifax decided a thirteen-year-old was available to them.
Calderdale has been here before, many times over. And the people responsible for making sure it stopped have never been asked to explain themselves in public.
Calderdale Has Been Producing These Verdicts For A Decade And Nobody In Power Has Answered For It
In 2016, fifteen men were convicted at Leeds Crown Court for systematically grooming and sexually abusing teenage girls in Halifax. The offences ran from 2009 to 2011. A Court of Appeal judge, when six of the men challenged their sentences, said one girl's ordeal transcended the imagination of most people. She had been passed around and used as a sex toy. The longest sentence was twenty-five years.
Between 2021 and 2024, a further twenty men were convicted across multiple trials at Bradford Crown Court for raping and abusing four girls aged between twelve and sixteen in Calderdale. The offences covered the period 2001 to 2010. The outcomes were hidden from the public until November 2024 because of reporting restrictions protecting parallel proceedings. The combined sentences totalled 219 years. Malik Quadeer of Halifax received twenty-two years for five counts of rape. Mohammed Akhtar of Halifax was sentenced to eleven years and died in custody. The rest were from Halifax. One man was from Dewsbury. The inquiry into this network began when the first case was reported in 2016, by which point the abuse had been running for fifteen years.
In May 2021, West Yorkshire Police announced that twenty-nine men had been charged with the exploitation of a single girl over seven years between 2003 and 2010, when she was aged thirteen to twenty. The offences took place in Calderdale and Bradford. The overwhelming majority of defendants gave Halifax addresses.
Today's six bring the documented total of men convicted or charged in connection with child sexual exploitation in Calderdale to well over fifty. The offending documented across all proceedings covers multiple victims and multiple networks, every one of them operating in the same borough.
A West Yorkshire Police Officer Was Charged With Abusing One Of These Girls. The CPS Dropped It.
Amjad Hussain, also known as Amjad Ditta, was a serving constable in West Yorkshire Police's Protective Services team, the unit responsible for safeguarding children. In 2009, while drawing a police salary and carrying a warrant card, he is alleged to have sexually touched one of the Halifax girls being exploited by the network operating across the borough during those years. He was charged in 2019 and appeared at Bradford Crown Court in January 2020 alongside fifteen other Halifax men facing charges of rape, trafficking, supplying drugs, and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.
The CPS subsequently offered no evidence against him and the charge was dropped. The CPS stated that further evidence had produced no realistic prospect of conviction.
A serving police officer, based in the force's own safeguarding unit, was charged with sexually touching one of the victims he was paid to protect. The CPS dropped the charge. The institution has never been required to answer for any of it.
He was not dismissed. He was not disciplined. He left. The institution recorded no formal consequence against him at all.
West Yorkshire Police has never been required to explain how a constable charged with sexually touching a child in 2009 was working inside their own safeguarding operation. No public inquiry has compelled an answer.
The charge sheet and the CPS decision to offer no evidence are both on the public record. Neither has ever been examined under statutory compulsion.
Labour Ran Calderdale While Children Were Being Raped And Offered The Inquiry A Press Release
Calderdale Council was under Labour majority control from 2019. For most of the decade before that it was under no overall control. The abuse documented across all Calderdale proceedings spans from 2001 to at least 2009. It predates Labour's majority. The council had various configurations of control throughout the period the abuse was occurring.
When the national inquiry was announced, Jane Scullion, Labour leader of Calderdale Council, issued a statement. Scullion said the council was committed to children and took exploitation seriously. The statement was designed to resemble a response.
Calderdale Council
Calderdale was never named in any demand to the Home Secretary and no Extraordinary Council meeting was called. The press release was the sum total of her response. Forty-nine words of commitment and not one specific ask.
The national grooming gangs inquiry began its work on 13 April 2026. Calderdale is not on the confirmed list. The people who could have demanded it be named chose not to. Every week Calderdale remains off that list is a week those institutions avoid compelled disclosure under statutory powers and the questions they have spent years burying remain unasked.
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Reform Controls Calderdale Now. Dan Sutherland Has A Decision To Make And No Excuse Not To Make It.
On 7 May 2026, Reform UK won thirty-four of fifty-four seats on Calderdale Council, taking overall control with a majority of fourteen. Dan Sutherland was elected group leader on 9 May. The new administration took formal control on 20th May.
Today, Bradford Crown Court sentenced six more Halifax men for child rape.
The Oldham precedent is directly applicable and Sutherland knows it. In February 2025, Oldham Council called an Extraordinary Council meeting and sent a formal motion to the Home Office demanding confirmation as an inquiry area with full statutory powers applied. It did this because the conviction record made silence politically indefensible and the public was watching.
Calderdale's conviction record is longer. The police officer dimension alone makes the case for inclusion unanswerable, and the decade-long gap between offending and public knowledge compounds it.
Sutherland should call an Extraordinary Council meeting. The court record makes the case.
- Over fifty men convicted or charged in Calderdale, offending running back to 2001.
- A serving West Yorkshire Police officer in the force's own safeguarding unit was charged with abusing one of the victims. The CPS dropped it.
- None of it has been examined under compulsion.
- That case goes to Baroness Longfield and to the Home Secretary.
Reform ran on accountability. Sutherland took those thirty-four seats from a Labour Party that looked at this record and chose to say nothing. If he makes the same choice, the people who voted for him will notice.
The survivors who gave evidence across a decade of trials at Bradford Crown Court did not do so to be told the borough where they were raped falls outside the inquiry's scope.
Sutherland must act and call an Extraordinary Council Meeting. Every piece of evidence needed is already on the public record. The inquiry's statutory powers exist specifically to compel what local institutions have spent years refusing to produce.
It is finally time for the horrors of Halifax to be cleansed with sunlight.
I’m Raja Miah MBE. For seven years, I led a campaign that exposed how senior Labour politicians helped protect Pakistani rape gangs. The people of my town helped force the national inquiry.
My work is free. No paywalls. No gatekeeping. No exclusions. Because the truth shouldn’t belong only to those who can afford it. If you can afford to do so, supporting me costs as little as 75p a week (£30 a year).