They Called Ann Cryer a Racist. She Was Right.

While children were being raped across Bradford, the state turned on the MP who dared to name the pattern. The evidence now proves she was right.

West Yorkshire Police put out a press release on Wednesday. It details how four men have been convicted over the rape and sexual abuse of a child in Bradford.

• Sohail Hussain, 40, rape and indecent assault.
• Khurram Iqbal, 39, indecent assault.
• Mohammed Sufyan Suleman, 45, two indecent assaults.
• Mohammed Baig, 47, three rapes and two indecent assaults.

Next to every name you will see the same words. Self-defines as Asian Pakistani. Four defendants, four times. A British police force telling the public, in writing, who these men are. I never thought I would see it.

Now put that document next to the one this force published in October, when eight men from the gang were convicted and the reporting restrictions came off. Names, ages, sentences. Ethnicity? Not one word.

I have shared both releases open and I suggest you go and look should one get quietly edited. Here is the link.

Nine months apart. The case didn't change. What you are allowed to know changed. And that is because we forced them. We did this. Let no one ever tell you otherwise.

Notice the wording too. The force doesn't say these men are of Pakistani heritage. It says each man self-defines as such. The men describe themselves, the force just passes it along. Twenty years of denial, and honesty finally arrives wrapped in a disclaimer.

Ann Cryer never needed the disclaimer. She said it plainly, in 2002, while the crimes in Wednesday's statement were actually being committed, a few miles from where they were being committed. She was the Labour MP for Keighley, inside the Bradford district, and for saying what a police force now prints as routine, her own party branded her a racist and drove her to the edge of public life. Wednesday's press release is her vindication, twenty-four years late, and the people who owe her for it are hoping nobody joins the dots.

So let me join them.

Seven Mothers Brought Them The Names

One morning in 2002, seven mothers walked into Ann Cryer's office on Devonshire Street in Keighley

Their daughters were twelve and thirteen. Groups of older men from the town's Pakistani community were picking the girls up. Their daughters would first get drunk, then drugs were introduced, before the girls were then used for sex and handed round the men's friends and families. The mothers were not guessing. They brought names. Some of them had already been threatened for complaining.

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Cryer did what an MP is for. She took it to West Yorkshire Police. She took it to social services. She put together a list of thirty-five alleged perpetrators and carried it to the elders of one of Keighley's mosques, thinking men of the congregation might best be confronted from within. The elders told her it had nothing to do with them. The agencies stalled. So in 2003 she went public and said what the mothers had told her. Including who the men were.

Watch who came for her. Not the abusers. Her own party. She was called a racist, a liar, a fantasist, for repeating what mothers had told her about the rape of their children. Then came the threats to her life, and on police advice a panic alarm was installed in her own home. An MP holding a list of suspected child rapists needed a panic alarm in her own home, and the people who put her there wore red rosettes.

Their Own Investigation Counted Fifty Men

Now the part almost nobody understood at the time. The agencies Cryer was supposedly shaming into action were already acting. In secret. In August 2003 it came out that police and social services had been running a joint investigation into the sexual exploitation of young girls in Keighley for roughly two years. Before those mothers ever reached Devonshire Street, the authorities were quietly counting victims.

You don't have to take my word for what they found. The figures sit in the annexes of IICSA, the national child abuse inquiry. In 2003, police in Keighley interviewed thirty-three girls aged between thirteen and seventeen. Up to fifty men were suspected of exploiting them. Ten were charged. Only two were convicted.

The first of the two, convicted in November 2003, was Delwar Hussein, a twenty-four-year-old youth worker. Fifty known suspects, thirty-three interviewed child victims, and the whole apparatus of West Yorkshire Police and Bradford social services managed just two convictions, one of them a man the system had employed to work with young people. You could not make it up. You don't have to.

So while Ann Cryer was being called a fantasist for saying children were being exploited, the people calling her a fantasist held case files with thirty-three of those children in them.

Then They Buried The Film

There was one more chance for the public to find out, and the Chief Constable himself took it off the table.

A film maker called Anna Hall had spent months embedded with Bradford's social workers for a Channel 4 documentary, Edge of the City. Two Keighley mothers are in it, fighting to get their daughters back from a grooming network. The film records the authorities looking at between fifty and seventy grooming cases in the area. Broadcast was set for May 2004.

‘The BNP hijacked my film’

Anna Hall was devastated when her Channel 4 film, which investigated allegations that young white girls in Bradford were being groomed for sex, was used as rightwing propaganda. She talks to Anthea Milnes.

The GuardianGuardian staff reporter

It never aired in May. Colin Cramphorn, Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, publicly called for the film to be pulled, warning the BNP would exploit it before the local elections. Channel 4 caved. The film sat in a vault until August.

Think about what was actually decided there. A chief constable whose force held fifty suspects and thirty-three known child victims looked at his district and decided the emergency was a broadcast date.

By the summer of 2004, every institution with the power to act knew the link between the ethnicity of the child rapists and their victims, twenty-two years before they finally admitted it. Every one of them chose to sit on them. And while they sat on them, a thirteen-year-old girl was in a children's home in Bradford, ten miles down the road. In the same district, under the same council, policed by the same force.

She Was in Their Care the Whole Time

The courts protect her identity, so we know her as Anna. Between 2002 and 2004, from thirteen to fifteen, Anna was a child in the care of Bradford Council, living in a children's home in the city. She was exactly the kind of child that investigation existed to find. Right age. Right district. Right years. They never found her.

What was happening to her is now criminal record. Raped and abused by a network of men, moved between properties across the city. One of them, Raja Zulqurnean, locked her at times in a cellar. Stopped her going to school. Cut her off from her family, took her money. On one occasion he hit her in the head with an iron and told her to give the hospital a false story about the injury. He is serving twenty-three years, and only because the Court of Appeal tore up the eighteen he was originally given.

Nobody came for Anna in 2003. Nobody came in 2004, or in any year after. She carried it for fifteen years, and in 2019 she walked into a police station and reported it herself. Then she got what the system calls justice. Seven more years. Five separate trials. Reporting restrictions. Verdicts landing in batches. Wednesday's four took the total to thirteen men. The nine already sentenced got 104 years between them.

Do the arithmetic the officials never will. One woman's report, twenty years late, produced thirteen convictions. The secret operation that was live at the time, with thirty-three victims sat in front of it, produced two.

When it was over, Anna addressed the men through the court. Read what she said, because it is the only honest audit this case will ever get. She lost her school years. Her basic rights were taken, her future stolen. And the trials were so traumatising that winning gave her no feeling of triumph at all. Only pain, she said, for the girl she was when these men came into her life.

“The investigation and trials have been so traumatising, the triumph of this trial has not left me triumphant it has left me feeling pain for the girl I was when you came into my life”. 

She did everything this country asks of a survivor. Survived it, reported it, gave evidence through five trials, won thirteen times over. Then stood in a courtroom and told them the winning was worth nothing. Those twenty years the institutions spent managing the truth were her years. Nobody has answered for one of them.

Now Read The Press Release Again

Go back to Wednesday's statement with all of that behind you. Self-defines as Asian Pakistani. Four times.

That is not courage. Courage was seven mothers carrying their daughters' abusers' names into an MP's office. Courage was Ann Cryer saying it out loud with threats against her life. Courage was Anna walking into a police station in 2019, on her own. Wednesday was compliance. Casey's audit made recording ethnicity in these cases a national expectation, and Casey's audit only exists because survivors and campaigners dragged this fight onto the national agenda over the resistance of every institution now taking a bow. I know what that resistance costs. I have spent eight years on the wrong end of it. The state has not discovered honesty. It has run out of road.

Ann Cryer is in her eighties now. She was right about the men. Right about the pattern. Right about the agencies, right about her party, right about every single thing they destroyed her for saying. And in twenty-four years, not one of them has said sorry to her face.

So here is what should happen, and I want you to help make it happen. The Prime Minister should formally apologise to Ann Cryer. On the record, on behalf of the party that branded her a racist and the state whose agencies buried her warnings. Not a warm tribute in an interview. A formal apology, with her name in it. And when the new national grooming gangs inquiry opens its investigation into Bradford, Ann Cryer should be invited to testify, if she is well enough to do it. She is the living record of what the institutions knew in 2002 and what they did to the woman who told them. No Bradford investigation that fails to hear her can call itself complete.

And I still have not told you the worst of it. When Anna was fifteen there was a wedding. An Islamic ceremony, binding a child in council care to the man now serving twenty-three years for raping her. A social worker employed to protect her attended it. Bradford Council has known since 2021, because it is recorded in a review the council commissioned into itself and hoped nobody would ever read. What the council did after that wedding is worse than the attendance.

Part 2 will be published tomorrow.

Imagine the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom being compelled to appear before a national statutory inquiry, placed under oath and required to answer for his own actions during the cover up of the Pakistani rape gangs.

You don't have to imagine it. You just have to help me make it happen.

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 publicly criticised the process.

Despite those efforts, 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.

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 month we have secured 700 paid supporters. That is an incredible achievement, but it is only the beginning. Our target is 2,000 paid subscribers. Every new supporter strengthens this campaign, increases our independence 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.

If you can’t commit to a regular subscription, a one-off contribution genuinely helps keep this alive. You can support me using one of these links;

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We’re up against a machine, politicians, police, officials, and media, working together to shrink, sanitise, and bury the truth. This work survives because of you.If you’ve ever shared my posts, learned something, or felt less alone reading them, stand with me. I need your help.

Eight years ago they said we would never force the government to admit these were racially motivated crimes. They were wrong.

They then said there would never be a national inquiry. They were wrong.

The same people now tell us that powerful politicians will never answer for what they did. What say you?

Raja Miah MBE