These Grooming Gang Ringleaders Did Not Escape. The British Courts Let Them Leave.

Eleven men convicted of raping, trafficking and sexually abusing children fled British justice. Six are still free. This is one week of reading public records. Nobody in government has ever counted these men. Why?

Kasir Bashir surrendered his passport. He reported to a police station every week for two years. He reported the week before his trial. Then, on the morning his trial opened, he was gone.

A jury convicted him anyway. Rape of a child. In October 2025, a judge sentenced him in his absence to 29 years.

One of the women he raped as a girl said his disappearance felt like his final act of control over her.

She understands what happened better than the police press office does. Their statements call him an absconder, a fugitive, a wanted man. Every one of those words tells you the state was cheated. It was not cheated. Bashir was on bail because a court granted it. His passport was worthless security because nobody checks who leaves this country. Every man in this article walked through a door the British state held open.

Last week I showed you that Bradford never counted the children. Seventy years of abuse and not one institution ever assembled the number. In that piece I wrote that another file was now open. Here it is. The same institutions that never counted the children never counted the men who fled.

I tried to count them myself. Let me be straight with you about what this is. One week of reviewing public records. Police appeals, court reports, press releases. Nothing privileged, nothing leaked. When I started the week I could document seven men convicted of organised child sexual exploitation who ran from British justice. By Friday I had ten. I found the eleventh on Saturday morning, while writing this article.

I counted conservatively. I excluded Adil Khan of Rochdale, who left Britain after release and broke no order by doing so. I excluded the lone offenders, like the Burnley man sentenced in his absence for the attempted rape of an 11 year old and still wanted today. My bar was men convicted of group-based child sexual exploitation with documented flight from justice. Even at that bar, eleven.

I do not know how many men there really are. That is the point. Eleven is the yield of one week, one journalist and an open laptop, and the number rose every day I looked. Nobody in government can correct me, because nobody in government holds the number. Six of these men are still free. And every one of the six was lost the same way. Not through cunning. Through decisions.

The Passports Were Theatre.

Sajid Hussain of Huddersfield surrendered his passport as a condition of bail. He sat in the public gallery of the first Operation Tendersea trial, watching. In June 2018, hours before a jury convicted him of raping a teenage girl, he ran. He was sentenced in his absence to 17 years. Eight years on, he is still gone, suspected abroad. The passport the court held did not delay him by a day.

Bashir's passport was surrendered too. Two men, two confiscated passports, two empty docks. A surrendered passport only works if somebody checks documents at the border on the way out. Nobody does. The court takes the passport, files it, and tells the victim she is safe. It is a ritual. Both of these men knew it.

One of the girls who testified against Hussain had panic alarms fitted. Her mother told reporters that after sentencing, with Hussain still on the run, police removed them. The man she helped convict was loose. They took her alarm.

Bail Was the Escape Route.

This did not begin with the men still missing. It began in Rotherham in 2015, with Basharat Hussain.

Hussain brothers jailed in Rotherham abuse case

Three brothers who groomed, raped and sexually assaulted girls in Rotherham are jailed for between 19 and 35 years.

BBC NewsBBC News

Hussain was one of three brothers who ran the sexual exploitation of teenage girls in that town for years. He was arrested in 2014 as part of Operation Clover and cooperated with detectives for months. He was released on bail. In June 2015 he flew to Pakistan. He failed to answer bail on 9 June and a warrant was issued for his arrest.

He had not been charged, so no court had taken his passport and no order prevented him boarding a plane.

His disappearance was raised at a meeting of Rotherham Council. In August 2015 he was arrested at Manchester Airport on his return, four months before the trial was due to open. In February 2016 he was convicted of fifteen charges including two counts of rape and jailed for 25 years. His brothers received 35 years and 19 years. His appeal was refused in 2017, the Lord Chief Justice describing his eldest brother as a supremely evil man.

Understand what that case established eleven years ago. A suspect in the most notorious child exploitation investigation in Britain was able to leave the country while under investigation, and the authorities could only issue a warrant and wait. He came back. Nobody made him.

Amar Ilyas of Sheffield was called Killer by his victims. He bit one girl. He held a gun on others and threatened them with gang rape. Operation Stovewood, the largest investigation into non-familial child abuse in British history, arrested him in 2020 and charged him in 2023. Then the court released him on unconditional bail. No passport surrender. No reporting condition. No restriction capable of stopping him boarding a plane.

Operation Stovewood: Three brothers guilty of string of sex crimes in the 2000s

A man nicknamed “Killer” and his two younger brothers have been convicted 18 years after they sexually abused four c…

NCA Logocms-user23

Amar Ilyas was released on unconditional court bail during which time he travelled abroad to Pakistan. He failed to appear for his trial and was instead tried in his absence. - National Crime Agency

He boarded a plane. A jury convicted him in his absence of twelve rapes, five against a girl under 13, and in June this year he was sentenced in his absence to 27 years. His barrister confirmed to the court that he was taking instructions from his client in Pakistan.

Ilyas once stood for Labour in a Sheffield council election. The party suspended him in 2020, when it says it first learned of his crimes.

Sharam Muhamadi of Doncaster was safer still. He was remanded in custody from charge to trial. Locked up. Held. Then, at the start of the trial, a judge granted his bail application and released him. He attended for one week. Then he vanished.

The jury convicted him anyway, in his absence, of two counts of trafficking girls for sexual exploitation. His co-accused, Bawan Hawre, received 32 years for the rape, grooming and trafficking of seven girls, some as young as 12. The last confirmed sighting of Muhamadi was at nine o'clock at night in Birmingham city centre, getting into a taxi towards Small Heath. South Yorkshire Police are asking the public to help find a man who was in a cell until a court released him.

Now understand that none of this was a surprise. Basharat Hussain flew out of Rotherham's investigation in 2015. Choudhry Hussain fled a Rochdale trial in 2016. Sajid Hussain fled a Huddersfield one in 2018. By the time a court granted Ilyas unconditional bail in 2023, and by the time a judge took Muhamadi out of a cell in 2026, every one of those escapes was sitting in the public record. The risk was not unknown. It was demonstrated, repeatedly, and the courts kept releasing.

Then hold this next to Lucy Connolly. A mother with no criminal record posted a tweet. She was a flight risk to nobody. She was arrested, refused bail, held on remand at HMP Peterborough for two months, and sentenced to 31 months over a video link from her cell. And her remand was not the quirk of one judge.

During the Southport disorder the Prime Minister stood before the nation and announced that individuals would be held on remand, and the courts refused almost every bail application that followed.

A Prime Minister publicly directed remand for people who posted words. No Prime Minister has ever directed remand for men awaiting trial for raping children.

Those men got unconditional bail, funeral bail, bail at the door of the court. British courts know exactly how to keep a defendant locked up. They simply decide who deserves it.

Their Families Helped Them Run.

Imtiaz and Fayaz Ahmed of Keighley raped a girl of 13. Regular readers know their names from the Bradford series. They absconded ahead of their retrial, believed to Pakistan, and in January 2025 Bradford Crown Court sentenced them in their absence. Their original sentences were so lenient that the Solicitor General referred them to the Court of Appeal, where they were increased. Their victim told the court that thirty years on she still cannot trust the services that were supposed to protect her.

Somebody bought tickets. Somebody kept quiet.

Then West Yorkshire Police did something seen nowhere else in this article. They went after the help. On 26 February 2025, officers from West Yorkshire and Lancashire arrested eight people on suspicion of assisting an offender, six men and two women aged between 26 and 76, at addresses in Keighley, Shipley and Nelson. Two more, a man of 24 and a woman of 37, were arrested the following month. Ten people.

Now ask the question the coverage never asked. Eighteen months later, where are the charges? Not one of those ten has been named. Not one has appeared before a court. No prosecution has been announced. And Fayaz and Imtiaz Ahmed are still in Pakistan.

I am not saying those arrests were theatre. I am saying that eighteen months on, the public record shows ten arrests, no charges and two rapists still abroad, and that West Yorkshire Police could clear this up in a sentence. This is still the only force in this entire article that has arrested anybody for helping a child rapist escape. That is the state of the art. Ten arrests, nothing to show for it, and every other force has not tried at all.

In Ten Years, the State Has Retrieved Two Men.

Choudhry Ikhalaq Hussain fled his Rochdale trial in 2016 after a court gave him bail to attend a funeral. He was sentenced in his absence to 19 years. In 2019 the NCA and Pakistani police arrested him in an upmarket apartment in Sangla City, Punjab, and extradited him in 2020. He is serving his sentence now.

Shahid Hussain, a Pakistani national, was charged in July 2018 under Operation Stovewood over the sexual assault of a 14 year old girl in Rotherham in 2003. He left the country and stayed away five years. In November 2023 Bulgarian police arrested him at the Kapitan Andreevo border post as he tried to enter from Turkey. He was extradited, convicted at Sheffield Crown Court and jailed for eight years, with deportation to follow his release. Twenty one years after the crime.

That is the complete record of pursuit. Two men in a decade.

Three others are behind bars, but do not let anyone tell you they were caught.

1. Umar Zaman of Huddersfield fled to Pakistan and was convicted in his absence of two rapes. Three years later he chose to come back, and was arrested on his return.
2. Arif Chowdhury of Keighley, described at his gang's trial as its mastermind, a gang jailed for a combined 140 years, fled to Bangladesh days after his arrest and spent a decade telling friends he was having the time of his life. In June 2022 he stepped off a flight into Britain and was arrested. Eight years, for one rape and twelve counts of aiding and abetting the rape of a 13 year old girl.
3. And Basharat Hussain returned from Pakistan of his own accord in August 2015 and walked into an arrest at Manchester Airport.

None of those three was retrieved. They came home, and Britain was waiting only because a warrant sat on a file. So here is the arithmetic of eleven men. Two hunted down and brought back. Three who returned themselves. Six still free.

The Choudhry Hussain extradition proves Pakistan hands these men over when Britain asks properly. Within these eleven cases, Britain has asked Pakistan properly once. Six men remain free because it is either nobody's job is to pursue them or no one can be bothered to pursue them properly.

The State Was Warned in 2015. Then It Was Audited. Men Ran Anyway.

Basharat Hussain left Britain in the middle of the Rotherham investigation in 2015, and all the authorities could do was issue a warrant. In 2018, after Sajid Hussain fled, senior West Yorkshire officers were reported to fear that criminal defendants were exploiting lax passport checks to flee abroad. The first warning is eleven years old. Since then, Bashir ran. Ilyas ran. Muhamadi ran. The Ahmed brothers ran.

Then came the audit. Last year Baroness Casey examined this offending with the whole of Whitehall answering her requests, and found the records so broken that ethnicity was missing for two thirds of perpetrators and nothing could be said about the national picture at all. The one audit this country has ever conducted could not count the men. It never even tried to count the men who fled.

Read Casey's twelve recommendations. A fugitive count is not among them. The category still does not exist in the state's mind.

And do not let ministers hide behind that audit. In June 2025 the Home Secretary stood at the despatch box, accepted every recommendation and announced a national criminal operation treating this abuse as serious organised crime. The next month, Amar Ilyas boarded a plane to Pakistan. A year later, Sharam Muhamadi walked out of Sheffield Crown Court and vanished. The national operation was running. So were they.

The Home Office has thousands of staff and no list. It cannot tell you how many convicted child rapists live openly in Pakistan under sentences imposed by English courts, because it has never once asked itself the question. So I am asking it.

The Questions Government Cannot Answer

These are not rhetorical. Every one has an answer sitting in a police file, a court record or a Home Office database, and every one could be produced within a month if a minister ordered it and opposition MPs dared ask.

1. How many men charged with group-based child sexual exploitation have fled this country?
2. How many were granted bail despite holding foreign passports?
3. How many arrest warrants are live right now?
4. How many of these men are living in Pakistan?
5. How many times has Britain asked for one back?
6. How many people have been arrested for helping them run?
7. How many victims were told that the man they testified against was gone?

I found eleven in a week. I do not know the real number. Neither does the Government. The difference is that knowing it is their job. Publish it.

Tomorrow

On Thursday, Reform was beaten in Greater Manchester. Beaten badly, in the region where much of the abuse in this article happened. Voters handed Reform this issue months ago in towns like mine yet stayed at home on Thursday. Anger is not a policy and Reform does not have one.

Tomorrow morning I will publish one. We'll see who picks it up and who is just playing politics and taking people for fools.

My name is Raja Miah. 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 bury the truth of OPERATION HEXAGON and 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. For too long this has been a one man operation. It needs to become something much bigger. We need the resources to build a genuinely independent investigative organisation with:

• A professional website capable of reaching far larger audiences.
• Video production that takes our investigations to millions more people.
• Research support so no lead is left unexplored.
• Live events to educate, organise and train others.
• The resources to investigate, travel and expose institutional failure wherever it is found.

Over the last six weeks we have secured over 800 paid supporters towards our target of 2,000. We are nearly half way there. That is an incredible achievement. Every new supporter strengthens this campaign, increases our voice and makes it harder for those in power to ignore the evidence.

If you believe the truth should be followed wherever it leads, please stand with us.

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Should we succeed, politicians will go to prison. Even if there is only the smallest chance of this happening, isn't it worth your support?

Raja Miah MBE