PAKISTANI MP TELLS THE RAPE GANG INQUIRY NOT TO FOCUS ON WHO THE RAPISTS WERE
SINCE 1991 BIRMINGHAM HAS TREATED THE IDENTITY OF THE MEN THAT GANG RAPED LITTLE WHITE GIRLS AS THE DANGEROUS QUESTION. KHAN REPRESENTS THE POLITICS THAT KEPT IT THAT WAY.
Ayoub Khan has tried to stop the inquiry into the rape gangs of Birmingham from looking at the men who raped the city's children. He did it the day before Birmingham was named in the national inquiry.
On 29 September the MP for Birmingham Perry Barr sent a statement to Birmingham City Council, West Midlands Police, Birmingham Children's Trust and the Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs. It said the focus must be on victims and survivors "rather than the identities of perpetrators."
On 30 September Baroness Anne Longfield named Birmingham for a Local Area Investigation, under terms of reference that require the inquiry to examine the ethnicity, religion and culture of the perpetrators.
This inquiry has the power to force witnesses to give evidence, and Khan wrote to it before it had heard from one. He ended his statement by declaring that "Birmingham has nothing to hide." Birmingham has been hiding these men since 1991.
BIRMINGHAM BURIED THE 1991 REPORT THAT POINTED TO THE MEN
In 1990 Birmingham City Council commissioned Dr Jill Jesson, a researcher at Aston University, to look into girls in its care, aged thirteen to seventeen, who were being picked up by men and passed around. Jesson found Asian private hire drivers in the social workers' own case notes. She says the council's steering group ordered her to take that link out and that copies of her report were to be destroyed. The report was not published, and when a motion demanding an enquiry into its suppression came before councillors in 1995, they voted it down.
Raja Miah
THE POLICE KNEW MOST SUSPECTS WERE ASIAN AND FEARED THE FALLOUT
By 2010 West Midlands Police had profiled child sexual exploitation in the region and found that the majority of suspects were Asian, a large proportion of them of Pakistani heritage. The force's own profiles warned that the "predominant offender profile of Pakistani Muslim males", combined with mainly white victims, had "the potential to cause significant community tensions."
When Shabana Mahmood, then Home Secretary and herself a Birmingham MP, announced this inquiry in December 2025, she told Parliament it would consider whether the authorities failed to investigate "out of a misplaced desire to protect community cohesion."
In 2013 the Birmingham Safeguarding Children Board reported that the city was failing to protect children from sexual exploitation. Victims were being locked in secure accommodation while the men abusing them stayed free, and the board called the absence of prosecutions startling. Inspectors found that West Midlands Police treated a thirteen-year-old who kept going missing from her care home with men as making a lifestyle choice.
In 2014 Birmingham City Council went to the High Court for injunctions against men it said posed a danger to a girl it was responsible for protecting, in the case of Birmingham City Council v Riaz and others. The council knew who those men were well enough to name them in court.
Raja Miah
The judge criticised the usual response in these cases, where action was taken against the exploited girl while nothing was done to the men exploiting her. In 2015 a confidential West Midlands Police profile identified more than 700 potential victims across the West Midlands in three months.
The men were there in the case notes, the police profiles and the court papers. Again and again, authorities pursued the girls or a small number of traffickers without pursuing the wider networks of men exploiting them. Birmingham's own record shows the result, with the children restricted while men known to the authorities remained free.
Anna Lamche
Baroness Casey's national audit found that authorities had "shied away from" perpetrator ethnicity for years. Even in 2025 it was still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators. Where reliable local data did exist, Casey found disproportionate numbers of Asian suspects and said the pattern warranted further investigation. Alexis Jay's report on Rotherham found that the majority of known perpetrators were of Pakistani heritage.
THE SAME IDENTITY POLITICS PUT AYOUB KHAN IN PARLIAMENT
The police record shows the fear, and eight years of investigating the rape gangs show where it came from. It came from politicians who depended on communal bloc votes and treated every question about the men as an attack on their voters. That is how children were sold for votes in town after town.
Khan won Perry Barr from Labour's Khalid Mahmood in 2024 by 507 votes, as an independent backed by The Muslim Vote. The Muslim Vote said its goal was to "empower the Muslim vote", declared "Muslims are united" and warned the main parties that their majorities in "Muslim-heavy areas" were under threat.
It listed Ayoub Khan among the independents whose victories it celebrated. This is sectarian politics, and it runs on the Mirpuri biraderi, which has delivered votes through family and community networks for generations.
KHAN CALLED SCRUTINY OF THE RAPE GANGS A "NARRATIVE" AND "PREJUDICE"
Khan was born in Ratta, in the Mirpur district of Azad Kashmir. In April 2025 he spoke at the Mirpur Airport Demand Grand Conference in Birmingham, a biraderi event lobbying for an airport in Pakistan, and called the rape of British children "a narrative that is done in order to sow division," lumping it in with Palestine and Kashmir. When he was challenged, he called the term "grooming gang" "racialised shorthand" and said "most group-based offenders in the UK are white men."
On 1 June 2026, when Parliament debated a petition to record and publish the ethnicity, nationality, immigration status and religion of child sex offenders, Khan said he supported publishing the data. He then said people focusing on "Pakistani, Muslim, Asian or migrant communities" were "revealing a prejudice."
Survivors were sitting in that debate, and Khan used it to attack the people asking who raped them.
THEN KHAN TOOK THAT ARGUMENT STRAIGHT TO THE INQUIRY
Khan sent his 29 September statement to the same council that buried its own research in 1991, to West Midlands Police and to the trust that runs the city's children's services.
His statement warns against "racialised blame" and the "false and dangerous insinuation" that these crimes belong to one community. West Midlands Police had already recorded both sides of the problem, an offender profile dominated by Asian men, many of Pakistani heritage, and an institutional fear that acknowledging it could cause "significant community tensions."
Khan is putting the language of communal backlash straight back in front of the institutions the inquiry has been created to examine.
His statement blames "coercion, misogyny, and institutional failure" and does not say one word about the men who raped the children. It tells those bodies that "effective safeguarding requires public bodies to ask difficult questions," and then tells them not to focus on who the perpetrators were.
The draft terms of reference said the inquiry "should" examine how ethnicity, religion or culture played a role. After consultation with survivors and others, the final terms say it "must" examine the role of the ethnicity, religion and culture of perpetrators and victims. Khan is trying to push the identities of the perpetrators out of focus in Birmingham.
The National Inquiry is entering the phase that will decide not just where it goes, but what it is prepared to confront once it gets there.
Birmingham proves why that matters.
We fought to get the city onto the list. Now, before the first witnesses have even been heard, a Pakistani politician is already trying to decide which questions should be pushed out of focus.
That is why the pressure cannot stop at getting places named.
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LONGFIELD MUST TELL KHAN THE RAPISTS WILL BE IDENTIFIED
Ayoub Khan wrote to the inquiry and published his letter. Anne Longfield must write back to him and publish her reply, so that every survivor in Birmingham can read it.
Her reply must tell Khan that the Birmingham investigation will examine who the perpetrators were, their ethnicity, religion and culture, and the networks they operated through, because her terms of reference require it.
Longfield must give survivors a public assurance that the word Pakistani will not be Tippexed out of Birmingham's inquiry because a Pakistani politician, elected after The Muslim Vote openly mobilised Birmingham's Muslim electorate, demanded it.
If she will not put that in writing, Birmingham's survivors will know whose side this inquiry is on.
Raja Miah MBE
My name is Raja Miah MBE. 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.
Children gang raped, communities betrayed, politicians and police officers involved protected, and you expected to shake your head and carry on as if nothing more can be done because lessons have been learned.
For eight years, I have refused. The police repeatedly dawn raided my home and falsified evidence to try and silence me. The newspapers smeared me. And Pakistani gangsters, under the protection of Labour politicians, followed me home. Islamists openly incited my murder.
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