THE COVER-UP KEPT THE RAPE GANGS INSIDE COUNCIL BOUNDARIES. THE MEN PAID THEM NO HEED.

TEN OPERATIONS. ONE POLICE FORCE. MEN ARRESTED ACROSS BOROUGH BOUNDARIES WHILE THE REVIEWS STOPPED AT COUNCIL BORDERS.

Ten operations. One police force. Arrests spanning borough boundaries. Seven boroughs left outside Burnham's assurance reviews. Bev Craig now holds the only elected office covering all ten. She can repeat what came before, or demand that Greater Manchester is finally investigated as one.

THE MINISTER SAID SHE HAD SEEN IT

Jess Phillips, then Minister for Safeguarding, said this:

"I have seen this with my own eyes… People have said, 'Oh, it might cause trouble.' I have definitely seen this, and it should never have been allowed to happen."

The minister responsible for protecting children confirmed she had personally witnessed officials deciding that pursuing the rape of children might cause trouble. She saw it. She named it. And she spent months fighting against the National Inquiry that would have exposed the people who did it.

When I say this was covered up, I am not making a claim the government disputes. Their own minister for safeguarding girls conceded the behaviour exists. Most of what follows is in documents the state has already published. Just not joined up like this.

267 GIRLS AND 97 MEN

Victoria Agoglia was fifteen. Manchester City Council had held her in its care since she was eight. In the two years before she died she was threatened, assaulted, returned to her unit intoxicated and in distress, alleged rape and sexual assault requiring medical attention, and told her own social worker that an older man was injecting her with heroin. Not one of those occasions produced a child protection investigation. In September 2003 a fifty year old man injected her with heroin and she died five days later.

Operation Augusta was launched in February 2004. Its scoping team went into the care homes of south Manchester and reported that they had identified at least 267 girls under the age of sixteen, all in the care of Manchester Social Services, all believed to be at risk.

They reported in the region of 97 persons of interest. They defined that themselves as a perpetrator, a facilitator or an associate of either. They described them as predominantly Asian men working in the restaurant industry.

The scoping report asked itself whether there was a common thread. Its own answer was that all the victims were young White females in the care of the local authority, and that the perpetrators were almost exclusively Asian adult males, many of them associated through the Asian restaurant trade.

One of the detectives who worked on it, Maggie Oliver, has described it as a carbon copy of Rochdale. Men of largely Pakistani heritage abusing vulnerable White girls, in Hulme and around the Rusholme area of Manchester.

THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WERE AVOIDING

In July 2004, a communications meeting acknowledged the enquiry was sensitive because it involved Asian men. Concerns were recorded about proactive tactics and about the incitement of racial hatred.

The senior investigating officer told the review team that community tension concerns did not influence his own investigative decisions, but that the impact clearly had to be considered by the gold command group.

The gold command group met at Manchester Town Hall, with Manchester City Council officers in the room.

And one of the people later interviewed described how those men were seen at the time. Not as sex offenders. A group of men from one ethnicity taking advantage of children from dysfunctional backgrounds.

It could have overwhelmed child protection. There had to be a degree of pragmatism. It might cause trouble.

THE GOLD GROUP MET. THE MINUTES DISAPPEARED.

On 22 April 2005 the senior investigating officer was told by a chief superintendent that no permanent staff would be found for Operation Augusta and that it would finish on 1 July. Burnham's review team asked Greater Manchester Police for the notes of that meeting and was told they could not be found. They accepted the explanation.

A Gold Command Group had met at Manchester Town Hall the same day. Senior officers from the force and from Manchester City Council, with their communications officers. And we are to believe there were no official minutes to a meeting that closed down an investigation into the gang rape of children with 97 identified suspects.

The only surviving record of what happened in that room is one entry in the investigating officer's policy book. An update was given. Press strategies were discussed. The group was informed the operation would finish on 1 July.

The review team asked for the minutes. Paragraph 1.18 of its report records that neither Greater Manchester Police nor Manchester City Council was able to provide a copy.

Both the police and the council lost the same document.

Augusta closed with only two criminal justice outcomes relating to the twenty five children it was set up to protect. Of the 97 persons of interest, the review team independently identified sixty eight by name. Five people were ever formally designated as suspects.

The review says it does not understand why many of the men identified as significantly involved in the exploitation of specific children were never designated as suspects at all.

At least 267 girls in the council's care. Ninety seven men. Five suspects. Two outcomes. Press strategies discussed at the Town Hall and no minutes anywhere.

THE POLICE FILES CROSS THE BOROUGH LINES

Greater Manchester Police has named ten child sexual exploitation operations.

• Augusta. Green Jacket, launched in May 2019, covering exploitation in 2004 and 2005 and including a fresh investigation into the abuse and death of Victoria Agoglia, and which had identified 126 suspected offenders by that October, up from Augusta's 97 on the same ground.
• Edison, launched in January 2020 after a survivor disclosed abuse in south Manchester, investigating Rusholme in the 1990s, twenty two arrests so far.
• Sherwood in Oldham, eleven cases between 2011 and 2014.
• Exmoor, Rochdale. Lytton, Rochdale. Earby, Rochdale and Oldham between 1997 and 2004.
• Bernese, which the inspectorate describes only as an investigation into the death of a child in 2003.

And two that appear on no published list at all.

• Operation Sky, under which three men were charged in July over 46 offences against ten girls in Bury.
• Operation Luka, targeting exploitation in Manchester city centre, under which four men were arrested last year.

Ten operations. Only five have ever appeared on an accountability list.

The combined authority publishes its own timeline. On 30 April last year, Operation Sherwood, the Oldham operation, arrested three men aged between 35 and 64 from Bolton, Rochdale and Oldham. Five weeks later the same operation arrested five more men in Oldham, Tameside and Manchester.

One operation, set up for one town, arresting men across five boroughs.

Those names are administrative labels wrapped around investigations into networks that never respected the same borders.

And the recorded scale has exploded. In May 2020 the force said it was investigating 49 cases involving multiple suspects and victims, supporting 271 victims and assessing more than 300 suspects. By last year that was 59 investigations, 714 victims and survivors, and 1,099 suspects.

SEVEN BOROUGHS BURNHAM NEVER REVIEWED

Every one of those ten operations sits in Manchester, Oldham or Rochdale.

Bolton, Bury, Salford, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford and Wigan were left outside the assurance review programme entirely. No examination of what their institutions knew, or when, or what they did about it.

Bury shows what that exclusion is worth.

In May 2021 two brothers were jailed there. Muhammad Hussain for two counts of rape, one sexual assault and taking indecent photographs of children. Hashim Hussain for taking and possessing indecent photographs of children. They had groomed the girls with vodka and filmed what they did.

In December, cousins Manzorr Hussain and Imtiaz Ali were jailed for fifty eight years between them. Hussain, of Manchester Road, Bury, thirty years for seven counts of rape and seven of indecent assault. Ali, of Ainsworth Road, Radcliffe, twenty eight years for five counts of rape, five of indecent assault and one attempted. Both ran stalls on Bury market, which is how they met some of the girls. Five victims, aged thirteen to sixteen, between 1996 and 1999.

Ali staged sex parties where a range of men targeted them. Hussain arranged for one girl to perform sex acts with strangers on a mattress in a flat. The abuse ran across Greater Manchester and into Wales, in homes, cars, a hotel and a car dealership. One victim was told that if she did not comply she would be abandoned naked on the moors. Ali had arrived in the UK from Pakistan in 1996 and began abusing the girls shortly after.

Hussain's older brother, Ghulam Hussain, 64, was arrested during the investigation. He fled the country, never stood trial, and is believed to be in Pakistan. Another one of how many? Who knows.

And in July, Operation Sky charged three men with 46 offences against ten girls aged twelve to sixteen between 1996 and 2003. One is from Bury, one from Bolton, one from Accrington in Lancashire. None of it is tested and all three are innocent unless a jury says otherwise.

Three prosecutions in one borough covering offences from 1996 to 2016. Nobody ever reviewed what Bury's institutions knew. The prosecutions came anyway, and so did Operation Sky.

Tameside was left outside it too. Scarlett West was a Mossley girl and the men were from Hyde. Her father ran for GM Mayor.

BURNHAM TOOK A CITY REGION PROBLEM AND CUT IT INTO THREE

The now Prime Minister had oversight of all ten boroughs, one police force and the policing powers for the lot.

He answered it with toothless assurance reviews in Manchester, Oldham and Rochdale. The same three boroughs that already had operations. Seven were left outside, and no review had the power to follow a name across a boundary, never mind out of the county.

He took a regional policing problem and answered it with non statutory local authority reviews. And then he hid behind it. Left to the Prime Minister, there would be no national inquiry. His reviews were used to prevent one.

Greater Manchester police investigating over 1,000 grooming gang suspects

Inspectorate finds force has made ‘significant improvements’ in how it treats victims of sexual exploitation

The GuardianHannah Al-Othman

TWENTY YEARS LATER THE POLICE STILL COULD NOT GET THE FILES

In July last year His Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary published its findings and singled out Manchester City Council.

The inspectors wrote: "Material provided by Manchester City Council took many months to arrive and was so heavily redacted that some pages contained only a few words."

Then, in their words: "This made it impossible to assess the evidential value of the information."

Green Jacket and Bernese were particularly affected. Detectives investigating the rape of children in that council's care had to go back to the beginning and start again.

DATA PROTECTION WAS THE REASON CRAIG'S COUNCIL GAVE

Its chief executive said the council must abide by strict laws on sharing personal data. A complex legal balancing act. A national problem. Paper records going back decades. A need to be certain the material could not be challenged by defence lawyers. He accepted the council may have been too cautious around redactions.

No law required Manchester City Council to hand a police force a page with four words on it. Somebody sat in that building and decided what detectives investigating the rape of those children were allowed to read. They did it for months. That council was the corporate parent of every child in that file.

In 2005 the minutes went missing from the Town Hall. In 2024 and 2025 the pages came out with four words on them. This is the thing Jess Phillips said she had seen with her own eyes.

Bev Craig ran Manchester City Council from 1 December 2021 until 31 July this year. The inspection ran under her leadership. The finding was published under her leadership. Her chief executive answered for it and she said nothing.

THEN CAME CHAUDHRY RUKHSAR AHMED

On 18 July 2024, Greater Manchester Police arrested him at Manchester Airport on suspicion of rape and of trafficking children in care.

Two women told the force he raped and trafficked them when they were young girls in Rusholme in the early 1990s. They were in the care of the local authority. That authority is Manchester City Council.

Rusholme. Whether his case sits inside Operation Edison has never been stated by anyone, and I am not going to state it for them.

Detectives learned in custody that Ahmed held elected office in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. The force asked a judge to restrict his travel. The judge refused. He spent two years on pre-charge bail. He was never charged.

Last month he was due at a Manchester police station to answer that bail. He did not arrive. Too unwell to fly, the force was told. In the same weeks he was photographed campaigning in Mirpur, and on polling day he took the LA-4 seat with 22,376 votes.

There is no general extradition treaty between the United Kingdom and Pakistan.

He is not the only one. Ghulam Hussain, the older brother of one of the men jailed in Bury in December, was arrested during that investigation, fled the country, never stood trial and is believed to be in Pakistan. In the Rochdale case that produced 174 years of sentences in October, one defendant absconded before the trial began.

Three separate investigations. Three men beyond reach.

The allegations reach back into the early 1990s. Rusholme is still in it. And the men do not stop at the borough line, the county line or the border.

THE NEW MAYOR HAS NEVER SAID THEIR NAMES

I have covered this ground for eight years. I can find no public statement in which Bev Craig has addressed Operation Augusta. None on Green Jacket. None on Edison. None on Victoria Agoglia, the 267, or the 97.

Four and a half years leading the council that was corporate parent to every one of those children, and not one of them named.

When the inspectors found her council's material had left detectives unable to assess its evidential value, her chief executive spoke and she did not.

When the national inquiry named its first areas, Oldham, Bradford and Keighley, and London, Manchester was missing and Manchester's leader did not ask why.

Then she stood for Mayor and won. Her victory speech ran to around eight hundred words. Peterloo. The suffragettes. Splitting the atom. Free buses. Homes, high streets, good jobs.

Twice in those eight hundred words she reached for hate. She praised the people of this city region for rejecting the politics of hate and standing for their neighbours. She said we have to move away from divisive politics that tries to pit neighbour against neighbour.

Not one word about the children raped in her city.

Her published account of what she delivered as leader lists an inclusive economy, investment in neighbourhoods, tackling inequalities, more housing and net zero.

And apparently also better outcomes for children and young people. No on knows whether not being gang raped is one of these better outcomes.

SHE NOW SITS ON BOTH SIDES OF IT

Bev Craig led Manchester City Council. She now holds the office responsible for holding Greater Manchester Police to account.

Ten operations across the city region sit inside the policing system she is elected to scrutinise, including the two her own council's disclosure held up. And Chaudhry Rukhsar Ahmed spent two years on bail under that same force, over two girls who were in the care of the council she ran.

She cannot say it is none of her business. For four and a half years one side of it was hers. Now the other one is too.

And the shape of the problem is the shape of her office. Ten boroughs. One police force. One mayor holding the police and crime functions for all of it.

THREE THINGS I AM ASKING BEV CRAIG TO DO

She has held the police and crime functions for Greater Manchester for a week. All three of these are within that office. Not one asks her to interfere in an operational investigation.

One. Write to the Chief Constable about the men who have gone to Pakistan.

Chaudhry Rukhsar Ahmed stopped answering bail in Manchester and won a seat at Mirpur. Ghulam Hussain was arrested during the Bury investigation, fled the country and never stood trial. His brother got thirty years. Kasir Bashir traded on Rochdale market and lived in Oldham. He absconded on bail before the trial that jailed six of his co-defendants for a combined 174 years.

Three men, three separate investigations, three boroughs, and that is only what has been reported. The force knows the real number.

The new Mayor of Greater Manchester should ask her Chief Constable, in writing and on the record.

• How many suspects and defendants in Greater Manchester Police child sexual exploitation investigations are believed to be in Pakistan.
• How many were on police bail when they left.
• How many held passports the force could have applied to take and did not.
• And in how many of those cases the force has asked for extradition.

Two. Investigate Operation Hexagon.

In August 2019, Greater Manchester Police and Oldham Council ran a joint gold command operation named Operation Hexagon. It was named twice in the terms of reference of the Oldham assurance review. Sean Fielding, then leader of Oldham Council, confirmed its existence and the surveillance it involved in an email of 22 July 2020. In December 2020 the force admitted that the referrals it made to the Crown Prosecution Service under it contained no child sexual exploitation offences at all.

An operation run at gold command level, jointly with a council, that produced no exploitation charges. She holds the office that can require the force to explain what it was for, who authorised it, who it was directed at and what it cost. Andy Burnham held those powers throughout it and never asked why his police force hunted the whistleblowers. Will Bev Craig do the same?

Three. Write to Baroness Longfield.

Craig should demand a local investigation into Greater Manchester as a city region, separate from and additional to the Oldham investigation already announced. Ten boroughs, one police force, one set of intelligence systems, and operations that arrest men across five boroughs at a time.

Paragraph 4.6.1 gives the chair and panel discretion over the historic period for each local investigation. Paragraph 5.5 permits evidence from outside the formal window.

She should ask for a period reaching the early 1990s, and ask that suspects, victims, addresses and businesses are traced across every borough line instead of stopping at each council boundary as every review before it has done.

Oldham is on Longfield's list. Manchester is not. Neither is Rochdale, Bury, Bolton or Tameside.

BURNHAM CONTINUED THE COVER UP. CRAIG CAN CARRY IT ON.

Augusta was shut down in 2005 and the minutes went missing from the Town Hall. Twelve years later Andy Burnham took the office that was supposed to hold the police to account for it.

He never used it.

He had the whole city region, one police force and every policing power in it. He commissioned reviews into three boroughs of ten. No power to compel a witness. No power to follow a name across a boundary. No question ever asked about whether the same men appeared in different councils' files, or what the fear of community tension had done to any of it.

Seven boroughs he never touched. And in the ones he did, the council carried on sending detectives pages with four words on them until the inspectors caught it in 2025.

In August 2019, under his mayoralty and his policing powers, Greater Manchester Police and Oldham Council ran a joint gold command operation called Hexagon. It was named twice in the terms of reference of his own Oldham assurance review. The force later admitted its referrals to the Crown Prosecution Service under it contained no child sexual exploitation offences at all.

Burnham has never answered a single question about it. Then he went to Downing Street and the record went with him.

In 2004 the police identified at least 267 girls in the care of Manchester City Council believed to be at risk of sexual exploitation, and 97 men involved in it. Only five of those men were ever formally designated as suspects. Two prosecutions came out of it that related to the children the operation was set up to protect.

Twenty years on, Greater Manchester Police is pursuing 1,099 suspects against 714 identified victims and survivors. It has ten named operations that I could find, and in one day last April, under an operation named after Oldham, it arrested men in three boroughs.

The evidence is clear. These men crossed Greater Manchester. The inquiries never did.

Bev Craig previously ran Manchester City Council. She is now Mayor for the entire city region of 10 local authorities. She led the council that redacted the files. She now holds the office Burnham used to keep the lid on the rape gangs. If she continues to stay silent, this stops being Burnham's cover up and becomes hers.

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.

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Raja Miah MBE