They Were Never Hiding. They Did Not Need To. The State Hid Them Instead.

THE MEN WENT HOME

Part 1 ended with a child in a police station, naming the men who raped her.

She was not naming strangers. She was naming men who dropped their own children at school that morning. Men who worked the counter and drove the taxi. Men who prayed at the mosque with men who respected them, who ate at their mother's table with their brothers, their cousins, their uncles. Men whose wives were at home whilst they were at the local branch meeting of the Labour Party. These were men whose own daughters were growing up two streets from the takeaway where they groomed the girls and the same age as the ones they gang raped.

The girls had files. The men had reputations and they had power.

That is why she was not believed. When the authorities weighed a frightened child against a working man with a family and standing, the man won. Every time. His respectability was not a mask that slipped. His respectability was part of the protection. As too were his ethnicity and his political allegiances.

THE ROCHDALE NINE

In May 2012, nine men from Rochdale and Oldham were convicted of the sexual exploitation of five girls. The men included taxi drivers and takeaway workers, aged between 24 and 59. One even included an Oldham Council employee with access to children. During the wider investigation, police identified 47 girls as potential victims. Five made it to trial. That gap between the counted and the tried appears in every town in this series.

The oldest made the girls call him Daddy. Shabir Ahmed, a father and grandfather, convicted of rape, trafficking, conspiracy and sexual assault. The BBC records the judge's description of him. A violent, hypocritical bully.

Among his crimes, he handed a 15-year-old girl he had raped repeatedly to a young man he called his nephew, who raped her too. A gift, within the family.

Qari Abdul Rauf, a married father of five, drove a taxi by day and taught religious studies to children at his mosque. A Qari. A man honoured for his knowledge of the Koran. Convicted of trafficking a 15-year-old girl for sexual exploitation. He took her to secluded places in his taxi to abuse her, and delivered her to a flat where he and other men used her. Sentenced to six years. Released after two and a half.

Adil Khan made a 13-year-old girl pregnant and denied he was the father. Then he found a 15-year-old and trafficked her to other men, using violence when she complained.

Abdul Aziz was called the Master. He took his victim to flats around Rochdale where she was plied with vodka and drugs and coerced into sex with gangs of men. The men paid Aziz. Nine years. Out in three years and seven months.

Six years for trafficking a child. Nine for selling one. The men who destroyed these girls' lives served less time than a serious burglar.

This was never one man and his mates. It was families. It was clans. It was the biraderi. Rotherham's inquiry named four brothers as a focus of concern the authorities failed to act on. Casey's audit found the groups were often built on existing relationships, mainly brothers and cousins. The survivors I have sat with over eight years describe how much further it went. Girls passed to uncles. Men of fifty taking their turn after men of twenty and thirty had their fill. Grandchildren grooming them in schools so that their grandfathers could have a turn. When Amar Ilyas was sentenced in June, he was sentenced alongside his two brothers.

Family was the structure of the offending. A stranger might talk. A brother never would, especially when the uncle was also involved.

THE FACT THEY REFUSED TO RECORD

Who were these men?

Baroness Casey examined the local data in the three police force areas that actually held it, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire and South Yorkshire, and found clear evidence of the over-representation of Asian and Pakistani heritage men among grooming gang suspects. Every time the state was forced to count, the answer was the same.

Nationally, the state refused to count. Casey found the ethnicity of two thirds of perpetrators was never recorded at all, while the sex of a suspect is recorded almost every time. She found the question had been shied away from across the country. She found official reports hiding the offenders inside euphemisms like the local community. And she went through a child's file in the archives and found the word Pakistani Tipp-exed out.

A word painted over with correction fluid by a professional at a desk. The local data convicts. The missing national data is the cover-up, wearing a spreadsheet.

Casey said it is not racist to examine the ethnicity of the offenders. It took the British state thirty years to produce that sentence. A 2020 academic study of 498 defendants across 73 grooming gang prosecutions found 83 per cent had recognisably Muslim names, overwhelmingly of Pakistani heritage in the towns this series covers. The state could settle the question tomorrow by counting. It has chosen not to for three decades. That choice protects somebody, and it has never been the children.

WHAT THE MEN SAID

The men have told us what they believed. Under oath, with lawyers present.

Shabir Ahmed used his trial to blame white society for what he did, and called his prosecution a conspiracy to scapegoat Muslims, a claim he kept repeating all the way through the immigration tribunals.

When seven more Rochdale men were convicted in June 2025 of treating girls as sex slaves, raping them in filthy flats, alleyways and warehouses, the police statement recorded that they showed no remorse.

The White girls were already ruined by their own people and available for use. The community's own daughters were guarded by honour, and the same honour would be turned as a weapon on any victim inside the community who dared to speak. Two kinds of girl, one system, and the men inside it saw no crime anywhere.

THE ESTABLISHMENT'S MEN

Some of these men were inside the political system itself.

Amar Ilyas groomed and raped girls in Sheffield. His victims knew him as Killer. After his offending, he became a youth worker, paid to be around young people. In 2016 he stood as a Labour Party candidate for Sheffield City Council.

Nobody in the selection process knew what he had done, and that is the indictment. The girls knew. The files, had anyone assembled them, knew. The party machinery that vetted him for public office did not, because for thirty years nobody had been made to answer for these crimes.

When his trial finally came, he fled to Pakistan, where he remains, sentenced in his absence in June alongside his brothers. Remember the Keighley men who fled the same way. I will return to who helps these men run.

In my own reporting from Rochdale, built on first-hand testimony I published years ago, the Heywood takeaway at the centre of the 2012 abuse connects to a former Conservative candidate for the council. The men did not sit inside one party. They sat wherever a seat was offered.

And then there is the Baron.

Lord Nazir Ahmed of Rotherham. A former Labour peer, from the town of the 1,400. In November 2020 he retired from the House of Lords as the Lords Conduct Committee recommended his expulsion over a separate sexual misconduct finding. He quit before he could be thrown out. Fourteen months later he was convicted of child sex offences committed in Rotherham in the 1970s, the attempted rape of a young girl and a serious sexual assault on a boy under eleven.

He was one of three brothers found by a jury to have committed the abuse. The other two were ruled unfit to stand trial. He was jailed for five and a half years. Three appeal judges cut it to two and a half, ruling the trial judge had fallen into error. He is out. He still holds his title, because removing a peerage takes an Act of Parliament, and no government has brought one.

In June 2025, within two years of his release, Baron Ahmed walked a red carpet in Manchester as a distinguished guest at the British launch of a Dubai property scheme run by two men banned from entering this country. Beside him walked Afzal Khan, the Labour MP. They sat together at the table. The company published the photographs itself, proudly, naming its guests. Manchester's civic leadership attended. Naz Shah MP graced the Mayfair gala.

Nobody hid. Nobody needed to. Whatever those in the room knew or chose not to know, a conviction for child sex offences had cost this man nothing that mattered. Not his title, not his welcome, not his reputation in the community he came from or his seat at the top table. This is what survivors mean when they tell me everyone knew. Everyone in these communities knew these girls were less than they were.

THE OFFICERS

Six women, survivors of the Rotherham gangs, have made complaints of rape, sexual offences and misconduct in public office against former South Yorkshire Police officers.

Police officers ‘also abused’ Rotherham grooming gang victims

One says she was raped from the age of 12 by a South Yorkshire Police officer in a marked police car.

BBC NewsEd Thomas and Ruth Green

Three former officers, all based in Rotherham at the time, have been arrested. One, a retired constable in his sixties, on suspicion of attempted rape and three indecent assaults against girls between 1995 and 2002, on and off duty. Another on suspicion of raping a teenage girl in Rotherham in 2004. More than thirty witnesses have come forward, according to reporting of the investigation.

One survivor told the BBC a police officer used the threat of returning her to the gang she was trying to escape. It was easier, she said, to be raped once than to be sent back.

None of these men has been charged. They are suspects, and must be treated as such. But the allegation itself is the darkest in this series. The girls ran from the gangs to the police stations. Six women say that some of the men waiting inside were no different.

One officer must be named, because the questions about him can never now be answered. PC Hassan Ali served eighteen years in Rotherham. He was one of dozens of named officers under investigation by the police watchdog over the handling of child sexual exploitation in the town.

Man cleared over Rotherham PC’s car crash death

Killed police officer was under investigation over alleged links to Rotherham child sex abuse scandal.

BBC NewsBBC News

On 28 January 2015, he was placed on restricted duties over the scandal. That same night, crossing a road in Darnall, he was hit by a car. He never regained consciousness. The driver, a student who knew him and held him in the road, was acquitted of causing his death, by a jury that was never told the man he hit was a police officer or what that officer was being investigated for. Nothing establishes any link between the collision and the investigation. The allegations against Hassan Ali were never tested, in any courtroom or any disciplinary hearing, and never can be.

The living investigation has its own dates. First complaint, October 2024. First arrest, that month. Third arrest, March 2025. On 8 August 2025, after South Yorkshire Police accepted it could not credibly investigate itself, the National Crime Agency took over, promising victims would remain at the heart of the investigation. That was a year ago this week. I can find no public announcement of a single charge in the year since. You will be told complex investigations take time. Operation Linden investigated 47 officers over Rotherham. Eight had a case to answer for misconduct, six for gross misconduct. The heaviest sanction imposed was a final written warning. Many had retired and faced nothing at all. Not one officer was dismissed. Not one was prosecuted.

STILL HERE

The sentences ended. The fear did not.

Qari Abdul Rauf, stripped of British citizenship, subject to removal proceedings since 2018, was photographed shopping in Rochdale, carrying a takeaway delivery bag, in the town where he found his victims. One of the women told the Mirror what that means. He is living near me, in the same area where he hunted for girls like me.

Charlotte Tetley did not stay to bump into her abusers. She was a victim of the Rochdale grooming, a woman the coroner would later record as having suffered significant sexual abuse as a child. In July 2023, one of her abusers returned to the area. So Charlotte left. The men stayed in Rochdale. The victim fled to Macclesfield.

In June 2024 she walked into A&E and told them she was thinking of jumping in front of a train. Six days later she was taken off the inpatient bed list, before any mental health specialist had reviewed her, and discharged, homeless.

In September, British Transport Police pulled her off the railway tracks and took her to hospital. She left before anyone assessed her. On 24 September 2024, aged 33, Charlotte was killed by a train in Macclesfield. The coroner ruled she took her own life and issued a report to prevent future deaths. Charlotte told them exactly how she would die. Every service she asked heard her, filed her and let her go, the same way Rochdale heard her the first time.

Abdul Aziz has been told by the Home Office he will not be deported.

Adil Khan fought his removal by telling a tribunal his son needs a role model, a father figure to teach a child right from wrong. His words, on the record. A man who trafficked a child, lecturing a court on fatherhood.

And on 2 July, Shabir Ahmed, Daddy himself, walked out of prison.

The women these men abused are in their thirties and forties now, raising children of their own, in the same town, meeting these men in the supermarket. Each case has its own legal history, its own appeals, its own barriers. The outcome of every one of them is identical. The men are still here. Where they left, they left of their own volition. Sometimes, during their trials!

The men were never hiding. Their victims named them, in interviews the police recorded. Their registrations were logged outside children's homes. Their names accumulated in intelligence files, in case notes, in council correspondence, in some towns for decades, while they worked, prayed, married, stood for office and walked red carpets.

Shabir Ahmed is out. Rauf shops in Rochdale. Aziz stays by the Home Office's own decision. Lord Ahmed keeps his title. Amar Ilyas is living it large in Pakistan. Charlotte Tetley is dead at 33, in a town she fled to because one of her abusers came home.

That is the scorecard after thirty years. The men kept everything. The girls paid everything. And through all of it, the files sat in the cabinets, full of names, read by people paid to act.

Tomorrow, the warnings. Who was told, when, and what they did instead.

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.

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Raja Miah MBE