THE REAL REASON WHY BURNHAM WANTS SHABIR AHMED ON A PLANE

INSTEAD OF PUTTING HIM IN THE WITNESS CHAIR FIRST

Pakistan is threatening to stop taking back illegal migrants over the Shabir Ahmed repatriation row. Officials in Islamabad say Ahmed, ringleader of the Rochdale rape gang, is "very much the UK's internal problem".

They're saying Britain's demands that they take Ahmed back after his release, having served 14 years of a 22-year sentence for 30 child rape offences, risk upending the arrangements under which Pakistan returned 1,437 of its nationals in the past year, rejected asylum seekers, visa overstayers and immigration offenders among them.

THE UK - PAKISTAN RETURNS AGREEMENT

The UK and Pakistan signed a bilateral Returns Agreement in August 2022, replacing the readmission arrangements Britain had previously used through the European Union.

The agreement provides a formal mechanism for the return of Pakistani nationals who have no legal right to remain in the United Kingdom. When it was announced, the Home Office said it would be used for foreign national offenders, failed asylum seekers, visa overstayers and other immigration offenders.

It is reciprocal, meaning both countries agree to accept the return of their own nationals where the necessary nationality and identity requirements are met.

The agreement also formed part of wider cooperation between the two countries on migration and law enforcement, including the sharing of criminal records and information intended to assist the identification and return of offenders.

In the year ending March 2026, 1,437 Pakistani nationals were returned from the UK, including asylum-related and non-asylum returns.

The full text of the 2022 agreement has not been published by the British government, so its complete terms and procedures are not publicly available.

Sources say Pakistani officials are especially incensed at UK government suggestions of visa bans and foreign aid cuts if Pakistan keeps refusing to accept Ahmed. Prime Minister Andy Burnham wants more foreign offenders deported to ease prison overcrowding, and Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood's department calls Ahmed a "non-citizen foreign national offender" whose removal it is "urgently exploring".

Pakistan says he's Britain's mess. They've warned that if we keep pushing, the returns stop, and cooperation on intelligence, security and organised crime goes with them.

ISLAMABAD IS REPEATING AHMED'S CLOSING SPEECH

In 2012, from the dock, Shabir Ahmed blamed Britain. He called his trial a conspiracy against Muslims and his child victims prostitutes. He told the judge who sentenced him that he was a racist. The judge had him removed from the dock before passing sentence.

Fourteen years later, Pakistan's Foreign Ministry is running the same defence. Last month they told the world Ahmed was raised, groomed and spoilt in Britain. This month he is "very much the UK's internal problem".

I wrote in July that the taunt was true. Britain's institutions did enable him. Eighteen years on the public payroll in Oldham. Eleven documented warnings unanswered.

So Pakistan, the UK government and I all agree on one thing. Britain enabled him. The National Inquiry exists because Westminster finally admitted as much. Where we part is what should happen next. For Ahmed and for Islamabad, it is the end of the matter. For Burnham's government, what happens next is a plane. For me it is the start of the matter, because Britain is not a person. Someone employed him for eighteen years. Someone received those eleven warnings. Someone decided not to act. Ahmed watched it all happen from the inside, and in fourteen years nobody has asked him a single question about it.

BEFORE ANYONE PUTS HIM UNDER OATH

The National Inquiry has confirmed Oldham as a Local Area Investigation. It will examine what institutions knew, what happened, and why children were not protected, using statutory powers.

What institutions knew is a question Shabir Ahmed can answer, because he was inside them. For eighteen years Oldham Council employed him as a welfare rights officer. He was a director of the local Citizens Advice Bureau. He was a member of the Oldham Labour Party. He raped children through the same years he drew a public salary, and his network included leading politicians within the town's Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities and its two MPs.

Ahmed knows who in that world knew what he was. He knows who was warned and who looked away. Whether anyone was owed anything is the question I have spent eight years asking, and he is the man who can answer it from inside. Every other route to those answers runs through people with careers to protect. His does not.

On 9 June 2026 the Divisional Court held that a statutory inquiry can serve a section 21 notice on a witness living overseas. So the power to summon Ahmed would survive his deportation. The power to enforce it would not, because ignoring the notice is not an extraditable offence. A notice can reach him in Mirpur. The power to make him answer it stays behind in Britain.

Every voice in this row is arguing about which country gets to hold him. Labour threatens sanctions to make Pakistan take him. Reform's Zia Yusuf calls Pakistan's threat laughable and pledges that as Home Secretary he would impose blanket visa bans, sanctions and asset freezes to force him onto the plane faster. The government and its loudest opposition are demanding the same outcome. Ask instead who benefits when the witness is on a plane.

The stories that expose them are the stories they tried and failed to imprison me for sharing.

Eight years in and even the mainstream media blacklist has failed to censor our campaign. Millions now know the truth of the grooming gangs, and who covered up what took place.

What comes next is the National Inquiry, and forcing it to go where it does not want to go. The only way to do that is pressure. We got it this far. Now help push it further, to a place where politicians are forced to testify. That includes the Prime Minister.

My name is Raja Miah. I led the campaign that helped force the National Inquiry. I need your help to make sure it is not a whitewash.

My ask of you is a simple one. Please follow my work on social media and take a minute to sign up to and subscribe to my newsletter Red Wall and the Rabble.

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SANCTIONS FOR ONE MAN

Pakistan has set out what the dispute puts at risk, the returns arrangement that sent back 1,437 of its nationals in the past year and cooperation on intelligence, security and organised crime. Against that, the government has floated visa bans on an entire nation and cuts to foreign aid. All of it over the removal of one 73-year-old man, in the same weeks the Inquiry that will examine his town begins its work.

Two reviews from Greater Manchester's assurance programme have examined the towns where he operated. The Oldham review, published in June 2022. The Rochdale review, published in January 2024. Neither took his evidence. Fourteen years after his conviction, the first sign of urgency from any British government points at the airport.

BURNHAM REVIEWED OLDHAM. MAHMOOD MOVED TO REWRITE THE LAW.

When Ahmed's release was announced, Andy Burnham declared he wanted "this vile criminal out of the country" and that nothing was off the table. Within three weeks he was Prime Minister. Nothing being off the table now means visa bans and sanctions aimed at the country more than 1.5 million British Pakistanis call their country of origin, including the family of his own Home Secretary. Over one man, the government is threatening the state its own citizens send remittances to, visit family in, and marry from.

The Home Secretary pursuing the removal is Shabana Mahmood, retained by Burnham when he formed his government in July.

The obstacle is the law, and a man who has made himself belong to nobody. Ahmed arrived from Pakistan in 1967, aged 14, and held dual British and Pakistani nationality. Britain stripped his citizenship in 2016 as the first step to deportation. He claims he then gave up his Pakistani citizenship too, allegedly by destroying his passport. Britain disputes the renunciation. Islamabad says its records confirm he is not their national. Two states, each insisting he belongs to the other, and beneath the dispute sits section 7 of the Immigration Act 1971, which exempts Commonwealth citizens resident here since before 1973 from deportation.

The exemption the newspapers call a loophole was a promise, made in law, to the generation invited here to work.

Eleven days after Ahmed's release, Mahmood stood in the Commons and moved to break it. Her amendment to the 1971 Act, carried through the Immigration and Asylum Bill, would strip the exemption for the specific purpose of making him deportable. The amendment is before Parliament. It is not yet law. A promise kept for more than fifty years, and it took the release of one man for a Home Secretary to move against it.

The assurance review into Oldham, commissioned while Andy Burnham was Mayor of Greater Manchester, was published in June 2022. Survivors' advocates condemned it. It did not interview a single one of Ahmed's political connections. It looked at the town where Ahmed had operated for decades and did not examine his network.

Four years later the National Inquiry confirmed Oldham as a statutory investigation with the power to compel witnesses. Within weeks, Burnham's government was threatening visa bans and aid cuts to get Ahmed out of the country.

That is the sequence. A review without powers asked no questions about his network. Now that a body with powers is coming, the man who could answer those questions is being rushed to the airport.

I am not telling you why this is happening. I am showing you the order in which it happened. The order speaks for itself.

PAKISTAN'S REFUSAL IS THE ONLY THING KEEPING HIM HERE

Here is the record.

A man who spent eighteen years inside Oldham's institutions was convicted fourteen years ago and has never been questioned about the people around him.

Two assurance reviews examined his towns without taking his evidence. The moment a statutory inquiry with the power to compel him confirmed Oldham, the government's urgency began. A Home Secretary moved to rewrite a fifty-year-old law for one man. A Prime Minister put visa bans, aid cuts and sanctions on the table against the country of origin of more than 1.5 million of his own citizens. And the opposition's only complaint is that the plane is not moving fast enough.

That is the record. My verdict is my own. Everyone else wants him on a plane. I want him under oath.

Pakistan's refusal is keeping the witness where a section 21 notice can still be enforced and the ringleader of a grooming gang be compelled to testify. If Ahmed boards a plane before the Oldham investigation takes his evidence, the deportation will be recorded as a triumph of border control. It will have functioned as another act of the cover up I have documented for eight years.

Reform, via Yusef, is saying what the crowd wants to hear, as it did when Farage promised an inquiry he had no power to give teeth. I will explain in the coming days why the demand for Ahmed's plane serves the people who protected him.

I am Raja Miah MBE. It is now eight years since I first started to expose how politicians protected the rape gangs.

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