WHY THE RAPE GANGS OF RHYL LOOKS WORSE THAN THE RACE RELATIONS IN ROTHERHAM
In Rotherham, institutions claimed they did not know. In Rhyl, a court had already granted a Slavery and Trafficking Risk Order against Mustafa Iqbal before a single charge was laid. He is accused of breaching it while the network ran beneath it. Wales must be inside the national inquiry. The question is no longer whether institutions failed. It is whether failure is even the right word.
George Herd
A court had already granted a Slavery and Trafficking Risk Order against Mustafa Iqbal. He is charged with breaching it. According to the prosecution case now before a jury in Caernarfon, children continued to be exploited while that order was in force and someone, somewhere, was nominally responsible for ensuring it was observed.
The Order Existed. The Network Allegedly Continued.
A Slavery and Trafficking Risk Order is the Modern Slavery Act's answer to the ASBO. Different name, different legislation, same result. A piece of paper telling a dangerous man what he cannot do, with monitoring that apparently consists of hoping he does not do it. The ASBO was discredited and abolished. The STRO remains on the books, still being issued and still failing the people it was designed to protect.
Home Office
A court granted one against Iqbal. To do that, a designated authority such as North Wales Police, the NCA, or immigration officers had to go before a magistrates' court, present evidence of a real and credible risk, and satisfy a judge. That happened. Monitoring Iqbal's compliance with its conditions then became somebody's job.
According to the prosecution case before the Caernarfon jury, the order meant nothing at all. The network kept running.
None of the people involved in obtaining or monitoring that order have been named, and none of those decisions have been examined publicly. When was it granted? Was it before the alleged offending began in April 2022 or after? What intelligence produced it? Who was responsible for monitoring compliance and what did that actually look like in practice? When the breach was identified, what happened?
The monitoring either failed completely and nobody noticed, or the breach was detected and nobody acted. The inquiry must establish which. If it is the second, the word for what happened in Rhyl is not failure.
North Wales Police Knew Enough to Run Two Operations
North Wales Police did not stumble across this network. They built two named operations around it, Operation Embank and Operation Zirconium, run by specialist detectives in parallel and covering alleged offences between April 2022 and March 2024. The CPS was involved throughout before charges were finally authorised in August 2025.
Detective Chief Inspector Rich Sidney called it "complex and long-running." That phrase means the investigation grew as it uncovered more, which means more was there to be found.
That intelligence came from somewhere. At some point someone in a position of authority looked at Mustafa Iqbal and knew enough to act. The question the inquiry must answer is what happened between that moment and the moment charges were finally brought, and whether what was known was passed to people who could have intervened sooner.
He Spotted Them From an E-Scooter. What Followed Is on the Indictment.
Caernarfon Crown Court heard on April 20 how Iqbal, a takeaway delivery driver on an e-scooter, spotted two girls walking through Rhyl late one night in 2022. One was 14, the other 15. They had already taken cannabis. Prosecutor Owen Edwards KC told the jury they were "obvious targets for predatory older men" and that Iqbal concluded they were "ripe for sexual exploitation." He took them to his home and summoned his co-defendants.
Glyn Bellis
Twenty-eight charges across five defendants. All deny everything.
Iqbal faces 21 charges. Four counts of rape, multiple Modern Slavery Act offences, conspiracy to supply cocaine and cannabis, possession of a prohibited weapon, and breach of the STRO.
Ziaullah Badshah and Mohamed Usman Arshad, who ran a café in Rhyl, each face rape charges and multiple Modern Slavery Act offences.
Jaswinder Singh is accused of arranging the travel of victims with a view to exploitation.
Gray allowed her home to be used by Iqbal to sexually exploit a child. After a rape involving handcuffs she washed the bedding. That is what the perverting the course of justice charge covers. Gray denies all charges and is on unconditional bail.
he court heard that one girl, already in a care setting, was given cocaine and cannabis in exchange for sex, groomed by Iqbal, and eventually handcuffed and forced to have sex. She was described in court as a "sexual plaything."
The system around her had produced a child who said nothing until the handcuffs went on.
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The Welsh Government Spent Months Blocking This
In January 2025, Darren Millar, the Welsh Conservative leader in the Senedd, called for a Wales-wide inquiry into grooming gangs. Welsh First Minister Eluned Morgan refused. When Millar raised the case of a South Wales victim in Plenary, Senedd Speaker Elin Jones repeatedly interrupted him. He was being "overly descriptive," she said, "verging on not being respectful of the victim," and risked "inflaming any kind of discrimination."
A politician was raising facts about child sexual exploitation in Wales. The Speaker told him to stop.
Millar later described being "jeered at, heckled and interrupted by members of this Senedd, including members of your own Welsh Government."
In February 2025 the Senedd formally rejected calls for a Welsh inquiry.
The record of that vote is here.
Two police operations were active in Rhyl at the time, a prosecution was being built, and a man subject to a Modern Slavery Act court order was allegedly continuing to exploit children. Morgan's position throughout all of that was that Wales did not need to look.
She had asked Welsh police forces whether grooming gangs were a concern. The response, co-ordinated through South Wales Police, was that there were no "current widespread issues." North Wales Police, which was running Operations Embank and Zirconium at the time, agreed with the line that cases in Wales had "not been organised in nature as seen elsewhere."
Gareth Lewis
The same force running two named operations into an organised child sexual exploitation ring in Rhyl co-signed a public reassurance that Wales had no organised problem. That is the Welsh Government's "no widespread issues" claim in full context.
By June 2025, with the national inquiry announced and her position untenable, Morgan pledged full Welsh Government co-operation. It was a retreat. The survivors she had spent months telling to wait knew exactly what it was.
The Survivor Group Was Built for Optics and Left Empty
Welsh survivor Emily Vaughn, who has spoken publicly about being trafficked and exploited by gangs in Wales and raped repeatedly by her abusers, launched a Senedd petition calling for a Wales-wide inquiry.
You can read and sign that petition here.
The Welsh Government responded in June 2025 by announcing a victim-survivors reference group as part of its child sexual abuse strategy. That group has never publicly met. It is April 2026. Ten months since the announcement. Nothing.
Millar raised it at FMQs in October 2025. The Welsh Government had no satisfactory answer.
His statement from that session is published here.
Vaughn, as recently as June 2025, was still insisting Wales should not become an "afterthought" and that survivors there had been "silenced, overlooked, or forced to seek justice through systems not built with their experiences in mind."
She was right. Everything since has proved it.
This article took weeks of work. Court records, FOI documents, Senedd transcripts, police press releases, statutory guidance. It is free to read because I believe it should be. But it only exists because readers support my work.
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The National Inquiry Cannot Find Welsh Survivors
The national inquiry formally started on April 13, 2026, and its terms of reference cover England and Wales. Wales is technically inside it.
Home OfficeIn March 2026, GB News reported that meetings between the inquiry team and survivors in Wales had been frustrated because no organisation could be found to liaise with and support victims in the country. One Welsh survivor said she was worried about being "left out" of the process entirely, and the best the inquiry could offer was an online meeting. Baroness Longfield was considering a visit to Wales before consultation closed.
Technically covered. Practically unreachable.
The Welsh Government spent months refusing to build the infrastructure that would have made Welsh survivors accessible to exactly this process. The inquiry team arrived in Wales and found nothing to work with.
The STRO was granted and allegedly not enforced. The survivor group was announced in June 2025 and has not publicly met in the ten months since. Morgan refused an inquiry and then claimed credit for co-operating with one. In March 2026 the national inquiry arrived in Wales and could not find an organisation to put it in touch with survivors. Every layer of this tells the same story.
The Pattern Is the Same Everywhere It Surfaces
I have spent eight years documenting this. Vulnerable children, usually in care or on its edges. Drugs as currency. Multiple defendants, and institutions that possessed intelligence and produced inaction while politicians who raised it were told to be quiet.
What Millar experienced in the Senedd in January 2025 is a version of what happened in every town where this was allowed to continue. In Rotherham the excuse was community cohesion. In Cardiff Bay it was inflaming discrimination. Different framing, same function. Shut it down before the specifics land.
The Speaker intervened because Millar was getting specific. That is always the trigger.
These Are the Questions the Inquiry Must Now Answer
The inquiry must establish what intelligence produced the STRO against Iqbal, when it was granted, who monitored compliance, and what that monitoring produced. It must also ask why a man subject to a Modern Slavery Act court order was allegedly free to continue exploiting children while that order was active, and how the intelligence behind the STRO connects to the intelligence that eventually produced Operations Embank and Zirconium.
But Iqbal is not the point. He is the entry point.
The STRO Is a National Scandal Nobody Has Examined
How many men in England and Wales are currently subject to a Slavery and Trafficking Risk Order, and what are their demographics? Under what circumstances were those orders granted, by which authorities, and on what intelligence? What conditions were imposed, and what does monitoring compliance actually consist of in practice?
These are not questions the inquiry has been asked to address. They need to be.
The STRO is the state's pre-conviction instrument for people it has already assessed as slavery and trafficking dangers. A court has looked at the evidence, agreed the risk is real, granted an order, and imposed conditions. And then, in Iqbal's case, a child sexual exploitation network allegedly continued operating beneath it while the monitoring that was supposed to make the order meaningful apparently amounted to nothing.
If that is representative rather than exceptional, the public has no idea. There is no published national data on how many STROs are currently active, how many have been breached, how many breaches were detected, and how many of those detections produced any escalation at all. The Home Office does not publish this information in any accessible form, Parliament has not demanded it, and the inquiry has not been pointed at it.
It needs to be.
Because Iqbal is not an outlier, there are men across England and Wales walking around under orders that certify them as slavery and trafficking dangers, with monitoring that is either not happening or not working, and children in their communities who have no idea the state has already looked at the man exploiting them and decided to manage rather than stop him.
Whether what was known about men such as Iqbal was passed up appropriate chains of command is a question that has not been asked publicly. Morgan blocked a Welsh inquiry while a prosecution was being prepared in her own country, and whoever advised that this was defensible needs to answer for it. Welsh survivors need to be found. Fund the organisations that can reach them. An online meeting link is not finding anyone.
In Rotherham, institutions buried what they knew and called it ignorance. Lives were destroyed and almost nobody was held to account. Rhyl is a different category of failure altogether. Here, the authorities certified the danger and walked away. There is no word for that which is kind to the people responsible.
This article reports on an ongoing trial at Caernarfon Crown Court. All defendants deny the charges. Nothing in this article should be taken as an assertion of guilt. The case is before the jury.
I’m Raja Miah. For seven years, I led a small team that exposed how politicians protected the rape gangs. Before that, I spent over a decade trying to stop violent extremists exploiting abandoned communities.
This work is free because the truth must circulate. But truth without numbers is easy to crush. The government does not fear facts. It fears scale.
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