OPEN LETTER TO BEV CRAIG, NEW MAYOR OF GREATER MANCHESTER
The New Mayor's First Test: Support The Grooming Gang Inquiry Investigate All of Gtr Manchester, Establish Who Fled, And Demand Answers Over Operation Hexagon.
She holds the police and crime powers for all ten boroughs. There are three letters she can write this week. One to Baroness Longfield, demanding the National Inquiry examines the whole city region rather than one town at a time. Two to her Chief Constable, on the men who have fled the country and on Operation Hexagon.
I am asking you to send it too.
Copy the letter below. Add your name and postcode at the bottom. Nothing else needs changing.
Then try finding out where to send it.
Go to the GMCA website and look for a way to contact the Mayor. There is a page headed The Mayor under Contact Us. It offers a form to invite her to an event, a link to the press office, and for everything else an enquiry form. No email address. The Deputy Mayor's page has a link that reads "email the Deputy Mayor" and takes you to the same web form. That is how you are meant to reach the person responsible for policing across three million people.
The addresses exist. They are buried in GMCA's own democracy records rather than on the page marked Contact.
Send it to:
the.mayor@greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk
kate.green@greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk
news@greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk
Subject line: Rape gangs: a request to the Mayor and Police and Crime Commissioner
Copy in your own MP and the leader of your council. Both are easy to find by postcode.
Alone, it is easier to ignore me. Ten thousand of us is a problem Mayor Craig has to answer. No matter how hard she and her office make it for us to contact her.
Dear Bev Craig
In addition to the powers that come with being Mayor, you are the Police and Crime Commissioner for Greater Manchester. You have appointed a Deputy Mayor to hold the policing functions. The statutory responsibility remains yours.
As you are aware through your previous role as Leader of Manchester City Council, Greater Manchester Police is investigating the organised rape of children across the entire city region. The force has confirmed that it is pursuing 1,099 suspects, that it has identified 714 victims and survivors, and that it is running 59 active investigations involving multiple victims and multiple offenders.
Records confirm that GMP has named at least ten rape gang operations. Some of them operate across local authority boundaries. Convictions of gang members demonstrate that the men came from across Greater Manchester.
The Mayor's own Assurance Review records that in 2004 the force identified at least 267 girls in the care of Manchester City Council believed to be at risk, and around 97 men involved. Five were ever designated as suspects. Two prosecutions followed. Paragraph 1.18 of that review records that neither GMP nor Manchester City Council could produce the minutes of the meeting at which the operation was closed.
Despite clear evidence of a Greater Manchester wide issue, no call has been made on the National Inquiry to investigate the entire city region. You have the power to change that.
One. Write to Baroness Longfield.
The Inquiry has named Oldham as one of its first local investigations. Oldham alone will not touch this.
Your own combined authority publishes the record. On 30 April last year Operation Sherwood, the Oldham operation, arrested three men in Bolton, Rochdale and Oldham. Five weeks later it arrested five more in Oldham, Tameside and Manchester. One operation, with one town's name on it, has so far arrested men across five boroughs.
The 2012 Rochdale gang was men from Rochdale and Oldham. Operation Earby covers Rochdale and Oldham together. The three men charged in Bury in July come from Bury, from Bolton and from Accrington in Lancashire. Kasir Bashir traded on Rochdale market and lived in Oldham.
It is clear that girls were driven between boroughs and out of the county to be raped. They operated across local authority area.
Three boroughs received assurance reviews. Manchester, Oldham and Rochdale. Your predecessor, now Prime Minister, has since been forced to admit his reviews were limited, that they could not compel anyone in authority to give evidence, and that what he instigated was not a public inquiry. No council officer and no police officer has faced criminal proceedings as a result of any of them. The other seven boroughs from across Gtr Manchester have received nothing.
1. Will you write to Baroness Longfield requesting a local investigation into Greater Manchester as a city region, separate from and additional to the Oldham investigation already announced?
2. Will you request a historic period reaching back into the early 1990s, which paragraph 4.6.1 of her terms of reference permits her panel to set and paragraph 5.5 permits her to look beyond?
3. Will you request terms that allow suspects, victims, addresses and businesses to be traced across every borough boundary?
4. If you will not, will you state publicly why these men are to be investigated one council area at a time when they never operated that way?
Two. Find out how many have fled and how many your force has tried to bring back.
Men who raped children in this city region have left the country and are beyond the reach of the courts. Nobody has ever said how many.
That silence tells survivors and the public alike that these men can flee and escape justice. And the communities of Greater Manchester these men come from carry the consequences of it while the state that let these men go says nothing. There are people in those communities who want this dealt with as much as anyone, and they are entitled to the same answer as everyone else.
Chaudhry Rukhsar Ahmed was arrested at Manchester Airport in July 2024 over the rape and trafficking of two girls in the care of Manchester City Council. He spent two years on bail without ever being charged. Allowed to keep his passport, last month he failed to surrender bail. Too unwell to fly, your force was told. At the same time, he was campaigning for election in Mirpur.
Ghulam Hussain fled the country during the Bury investigation and never stood trial. His brother was sentenced to thirty years. Kasir Bashir absconded before the Rochdale trial that jailed six of his co-defendants for a combined 174 years.
Britain has no standing extradition treaty with Pakistan. Where no treaty exists a man can still be returned, but only through a special arrangement between the two governments under section 194 of the Extradition Act 2003. Nothing goes to prosecutors, nothing goes to government and nothing is put to Pakistan unless your force asks for it first.
Whether these men are ever brought back depends on what Greater Manchester Police has done. Will you write to your Chief Constable and put these questions to him.
5. How many suspects and defendants in Greater Manchester Police rape gang investigations are believed to have left the United Kingdom?
6. Which countries are they believed to be in?
7. How many were on police bail when they left?
8. In how many has a request for special arrangements under section 194 of the Extradition Act 2003 been made to the Home Office?
Then publish what he sends back.
Three. Require your Chief Constable to account for Operation Hexagon.
In August 2019 your force and Oldham Council ran a joint Gold Command operation under that name. It appears twice in the terms of reference of the Oldham assurance review, so the people who wrote those terms knew it existed. Sean Fielding, then leader of Oldham Council, confirmed its existence and the surveillance it involved in an email dated 22 July 2020. In December 2020 the force admitted that its referrals to the Crown Prosecution Service under Hexagon contained no child sexual exploitation offences at all.
The seriousness of the actions of Greater Manchester Police cannot be underestimated. While children were being gang raped and trafficked across Greater Manchester, a gold command operation was run against the people trying to expose it.
Will you, as a matter of urgency, write to him again and put these questions.
9. What was Operation Hexagon for?
10. Who authorised it?
11. Who was it directed at?
12. What surveillance was carried out, and on whom?
13. What did it cost?
Then publish what he sends back.
Why this matters.
Andy Burnham held your office for nine years. He commissioned reviews in three boroughs of ten and has since admitted they were limited. He never why his police force went after the whistleblowers. He is now the Prime Minister, and he is judged for it.
You hold that office now. Three letters is what it takes.
Write them, and you are the first person in this role to look at the whole of Greater Manchester. Do not write them, and you have made the same choice he made, knowing what happened under his, and you will be judged the same way.
Andy Burnham held your office for nine years. He commissioned reviews in three boroughs of ten and has since admitted they were limited. Men wanted for the rape of children left the country under his watch and he never told the public how many. He never asked why his police force went after the whistleblowers. He is now the Prime Minister, and he is judged for it.
You hold that office now. Three letters is what it takes.
Write them, and you are the first person in this role to look at the whole of Greater Manchester. Do not write them, and you have made the same choice he made, and you will be judged the same way.
I look forward to your response.
Yours Sincerely
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'.
Three boroughs of ten were reviewed. Seven were never looked at. His own review team asked for the minutes of the meeting that closed down an investigation into 97 identified suspects, was told they could not be found, and accepted it. Operation Hexagon ran under his mayoralty and his policing powers, and he has never answered a single question about it.
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.
And now the office he left has passed to Bev Craig. She led Manchester City Council while inspectors found its material was reaching detectives so heavily redacted that some pages carried only a few words. She has never publicly named Augusta, Green Jacket, Edison or Victoria Agoglia. She has held the police and crime powers for a week.
I have asked her to do three things. Write to her Chief Constable about the men who have gone to Pakistan. Investigate Operation Hexagon. And write to Baroness Longfield demanding the whole city region is investigated, not one town at a time.
I will publish what she does. I will publish what she does not.
That is why this campaign cannot slow down now. Which is why I need your help to be able to continue.
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Should we succeed, politicians will go to prison. Even if there is only the smallest chance of this happening, isn't it worth your support?
Raja Miah MBE