Pakistan is Right. Britain Did Groom Shabir Ahmed.

Pakistan says Britain raised and groomed the Rochdale ringleader. The record shows how British institutions taught him, eleven times over, that nobody was coming to stop him.

Pakistan blames UK for allowing Rochdale grooming gang leader to commit his crimes

‘Onus lies on where he grew up, was raised, groomed, and unfortunately spoiled,’ Islamabad official claims

The IndependentJane Dalton

When Pakistan's Foreign Ministry announced that Shabir Ahmed was raised, groomed and spoilt in Britain, the words were chosen to wound. Its spokesman reached for the vocabulary of child rape to tell us the ringleader of the Rochdale gang is our problem, and he wanted that to be the end of the matter.

It is the beginning of one, because the taunt is true. Britain groomed Shabir Ahmed, and I mean the word precisely.

Grooming is a method. The groomer wins the victim's trust and then proves, over and over until it no longer needs proving, that nobody is coming to help.

Read the record of Ahmed's years in Oldham and you watch British institutions run that method to the letter, handing the trust to a man on the public payroll and teaching the lesson about help to the girls, in writing, signed and dated, long after they knew what he was.

Islamabad should be careful with this argument, and I will come to why. First, the record.

They Put Him On The Payroll

The press reported it at the time of his conviction, a line in the small print that the ringleader had worked for Oldham Council. There the reporting stopped, and everything that mattered stayed out of view. Ahmed was seconded to the Oldham Pakistani Community Centre as a welfare rights officer, a posting that took him out of the Civic Centre altogether and put him across the desk from families in difficulty, with access to their children.

Before the council he had driven taxis. Alongside the council post he sat on the board of the local Citizens Advice Bureau, and he carried an Oldham Labour Party card.

The Assurance Review confirms the membership in a single sentence and leaves it there. Warren Bates, a former Oldham councillor who spoke to me before his death, took it further. Ahmed was a regular in the offices of both of the town's Labour MPs, Michael Meacher and Phil Woolas. Regular was Bates's word, and he chose it deliberately. No published review has ever examined that relationship, and neither MP was publicly asked in his lifetime what access Ahmed had or why. Both men are now dead. The question passes to the inquiry.

When people ask me what I mean by the connection between community gatekeepers, public money and political access, I no longer need a diagram. One man's CV covers it.

None of the rest came out through the press or through the review either. It came to me. Oldham Council insiders contacted me and told me Ahmed had been protected. That is their allegation, and I record it as one. What can be stated as fact is that the Andy Burnham's Assurance Review, which named him only as Offender A, never tested it. Nobody was asked whether influence was exercised on his behalf, or why years of warnings produced nothing. What the review did instead was scatter the evidence across its paragraphs so thinly that no reader would ever see it whole.

So let me put it back together.

They Let Him Walk Eleven Times

I have said before that the system let Ahmed go at least nine times. I was wrong. I undercounted. Read paragraphs 1.46 to 1.53 of the Assurance Review with a pen in your hand and the number is eleven.

1. In 2005, Greater Manchester Police received a serious allegation of child sexual abuse against Ahmed. No crime was recorded. The review admits this breached the National Crime Recording Standard in force at the time.
2. The police failed to notify the local authority responsible for a young child he was known to have contact with.
3. The police failed to notify Oldham Council, his employer, despite knowing he was a council employee whose job put him among vulnerable families. The review concedes, in its careful way, that informing the council may have potentially avoided the tragic abuse of other children.
4. In February 2008 he was arrested for sexual assault on a child. No crime recorded, no further action.
5. In July 2008 he was arrested on suspicion of abducting two other children. No crime recorded, no further action.
6. In August 2008, Rochdale Borough Council and GMP held a strategy discussion which noted the 2005 allegations. Oldham was kept in the dark, and the safety of any child he still had contact with went unconsidered.
7. In September 2008 the Probation Service told Oldham Council that their former employee had been charged with sexual assault. The council did nothing.
8. In December 2010 a meeting about him was held in Rochdale, without Oldham being invited. The council learned of it in January 2011 and once again did nothing.
9. On 22 March 2011 he was charged with child rape and remanded into custody. The Probation Service notified the council days later. No assessment followed.
10. In April 2011, GMP requested the council's files and flagged a second child at risk. The council held no strategy discussion, and it has been unable to locate any record explaining why.
11. In 2012, with Ahmed already on remand for child rape, another young woman disclosed that he had abused her. Children's social care closed her case within days without any assessment. GMP discontinued it for having no realistic prospect of conviction, a decision the police took alone and never put to the Crown Prosecution Service.

Eleven occasions across seven years, every one drawn from the review's own paragraphs. The review reduces all of it to three words, "serious multiple failures".

The evidence behind those words sits in Appendix E, a confidential annex marked not for publication, which holds the review team's full report on Offender A alongside its full reports on three other offenders and two councillors. The public is not permitted to read a page of it.

And after the eleventh came the convictions, thirty-two counts of rape and further offences across two trials, and still nobody looked. Oldham Council never once opened the personnel file of its employee of eighteen years to ask what all that access had cost. There was no referral to the designated officer and no disciplinary review, and his conduct in post was never examined.

The review confirms it without meaning to, describing the botched 2012 case as yet another opportunity to trigger a detailed review of his employment, an opportunity that was never taken then or since.

The public did not even learn the significance of who Ahmed's employer had been until the review published in 2022, ten years after his conviction, and when residents confronted the council that June, its leader's defence was that the council had not known and had not protected him. Nobody in that room was told the council had investigated, because it never had. I put that question to council leaders at the time myself. No investigation was ever pointed to whilst Shabir Ahmed had access to children. The national inquiry should now ask why one was never held.

They Called The Girls Liars First

In August 2008, a fifteen-year-old girl was arrested outside a takeaway in Heywood after drinking heavily and smashing the place up. She told the officers why. She had been raped, repeatedly, by the men who ran her, and she handed over her own underwear as proof. Over six hours of recorded video testimony she set out what Ahmed and the men around him were doing. The detectives who investigated concluded she was telling the truth.

The Crown Prosecution Service overruled them. After an eleven-month inquiry, with the DNA evidence in the file and the police persuaded, a CPS lawyer decided a jury would not believe a girl like her, troubled, hard-drinking, sexually active, and declined to charge.

The objection was never to her account. It was to her.

The gang had told the girls nobody would believe them, and the Crown confirmed it in writing. What that decision purchased is on the record. The abuse intensified, the ring grew, the girl was passed to as many as five men a day, and by the time the case finally reached court there were at least forty-seven victims or witnesses. The offending ran for two more years before Nazir Afzal arrived, reversed the decision on his first look at the file, and began the prosecutions that put Ahmed away. Afzal has said publicly that the wrong decision was made. When it came to calling these children liars, the Crown got there before the gang needed to say a word.

They Wrote The Girls Off In Their Files

While Ahmed drew his council salary, children in Rochdale and Oldham were being recorded by social services as having made lifestyle choices. Girls of twelve, thirteen and fourteen appear in the files of this period as though they were consenting participants in their own abuse. Children in care, already failed once by the state, were assessed as streetwise and difficult, beyond anybody's help.

A groomer's final lesson to his victim is that nobody is coming, and the paperwork proves the state taught it. When the review examined the case of the girl it called Sophie, abused from the age of twelve after she reported being raped, it found significant opportunities missed to protect her. Missed is the review's word for it.

The files recorded the abandonment in full, in official language, signed and dated, and Sophie herself was told at Oldham police station to come back with an adult when she was not drunk. She was twelve. Ahmed never needed to isolate his victims from the authorities because the authorities got there years ahead of him.

They Feared The Word More Than The Crime

The men in Ahmed's network were Pakistani. The records of the time called them Asian, and the review itself admits as much. Footnote 14 of the Assurance Review states that it replicated the term Asian because that is what the records used, then concedes that references to individuals described as Asian are likely to generally relate to British people of Pakistani heritage.

The officers who sat across interview tables from these men knew who they were. The files kept the vaguer word. In towns where the Pakistani community organisations, among them the very centre Ahmed was seconded to, sat close to the votes that decided who ran the council, the political incentive for imprecision was obvious. Investigating the networks properly risked angering the gatekeepers, and naming the pattern out loud invited the accusation that ends careers.

Nobody wrote an instruction ordering officers to ignore raped children. The pressure never needs one. The system made the price of pushing obvious, while abandoning the girls carried no political cost. They had nothing to bargain with, no family name that carried weight in the town and no votes anybody was counting.

Ahmed understood his position perfectly. He had spent eighteen years inside the very structures the officials feared to offend, and the state's cowardice was the water he swam in.

They Buried The Second Trial

Ahmed was convicted twice in 2012. The May trial at Liverpool was the Rochdale gang case, two rapes, aiding and abetting rape, sexual assault, trafficking, nineteen years, and it ran on every front page in the country, though Ahmed himself could not be named because he faced further charges.

The June trial at Manchester convicted him of thirty rapes, a girl abused on an almost weekly basis for more than a decade, and it drew a fraction of the attention.

The man who prosecuted him went further than that. In May 2017, Nazir Afzal posted that no coverage was given to the later prosecution of the Rochdale ringleader for the sexual abuse of a girl of his own ethnicity, for which he got twenty-two years. That is the prosecutor of the case stating in public that the bigger conviction had passed in almost silence, and his post sat on his feed for nine years without a newspaper picking it up.

The twenty-two years ran concurrently with the nineteen. Thirty rapes, and the sentence cost him not one additional day, which is how fourteen years in prison came to cover all of it.

The review's record shows how long the road to that second trial was. In 2005, a woman who was an adult by the time police saw her reported abuse from her childhood. It took until March 2011, and every one of the eleven releases counted above, before Ahmed was charged with the rape of that same child and remanded into custody.

The burying did not stop with the trial. Another fact about the case surfaced publicly only on 2 July 2026, the day the release coverage broke, when Afzal said this on camera.

"His wife, you probably don't know this, died by suicide when he was arrested."

You probably don't know this. The prosecutor of the most infamous grooming case in the country, telling the public fourteen years later how the ringleader's wife died, because he knew they had never been told.

Then He Thanked Them From The Dock

At the Liverpool trial, Ahmed showed the court what years of impunity had taught him. He called the judge a racist bastard and accused the all-white jury of racism. He claimed the children he raped were prostitutes running a business empire, and that the case against him was white lies. And he told the court whose fault it all was. White society had neglected its girls and tolerated their behaviour, and then, in his words, reported by the Associated Press on 2 July 2012:

"You white people train them in sex and drinking, so when they come to us they are fully trained."

The judge saw it exactly. Gerald Clifton told the gang they had treated the girls as though they were worthless and beyond any respect, because the victims were not of their community or religion.

The second trial ended with Ahmed dragged from the dock. Judge Mushtaq Khokhar had him removed before sentence could be passed because he would not stop interrupting, and on his way out Ahmed shouted that it was all lies, all concocted by the police, then turned on the journalists in the gallery and shouted, "What are you looking at?"

Listen to the argument underneath. The girls were prostitutes, the case was White lies, the police concocted it, and Britain had trained its daughters before they ever reached him. It was the logic of everything the state had shown him, recited back as a defence.

Why would a man who had walked away eleven times believe the girls mattered?

He was still giving the speech four years later, telling an immigration tribunal he had been convicted by eleven White jurors and that it had become fashionable to blame everything on Muslims. And fourteen years after the trials, Pakistan's Foreign Ministry stood at a podium and ran the same argument with flags behind it. Britain raised him, so the wreckage is Britain's to own.

The diplomatic position of the Pakistani state is Shabir Ahmed's closing speech from the dock, delivered with better manners.

Both Countries Made Him

This is why Islamabad should be careful. The taunt cuts both ways.

Britain groomed Ahmed into impunity, eighteen years on the public payroll while warnings went ignored and the Crown itself disbelieved his victims. Oldham Council gave him a salary, a trusted position among vulnerable families and, eleven times over, proof that acting on his contempt for girls outside his community carried no cost.

That contempt was never council issue, and the kinship loyalties and biraderi structures that shape political and community life in these towns predate any English town hall. I have spent eight years documenting how those structures work, the obligations, the silences, the brokered votes. Whether they built access, silence or protection around Ahmed is exactly what the inquiry is now ordered to examine, alongside what part ethnicity, religion and culture played in these crimes. Pakistan cannot demand that the examination stop at its own border while refusing to take back the man it insists is ours.

Both countries made Shabir Ahmed. One of them now has a statutory inquiry with the power to find out how. It can compel the officials who kept him on the payroll and the officers who let him walk eleven times. The 2009 charging decision belongs under oath, alongside Appendix E and every witness who can speak to its pages, and so does the question no review has dared touch, how far the influence of an establishment man with a party card actually reached.

Pakistan says we groomed him. PI think we should prove them right, under oath, name by name. Then we should send Islamabad the bill.

We Did Not Come This Far To Kneel At The Gates Of Number 10.

The campaign to expose the cover up of the industrial scale gang rape of little White girls by bloc postal vote supplying clans of Pakistani men has never depended on the powerful giving us permission.

Just look how we forced a national statutory inquiry that the establishment did everything possible to prevent.

Now comes the harder fight. We must force the national inquiry to call Burnham to account for what happened on his watch. He must be made to answer for his role in the cover up. He must be forced to testify on Operation Hexagon.

As Prime Minister, he will use every tool of government to avoid it. He will have the lawyers, the advisers and the friendly newspapers.

It makes no difference. I have you.

If you believe Andy Burnham must answer for what was done under his authority, stand with me and support the campaign that will see politicians made to answer for what they did.

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