Will no one take the blame? As gang took girl of 12 as a sex slave, her father was walking the streets in vain, clutching her photo



The girls braved a hostile interrogation in court, branded liars by the gang’s barristers. A QC suggested one girl of 13 had ‘enjoyed herself’ during sex.



Another suggested they were ‘naughty girls doing grown-up things’. But the jury believed them. SAM GREENHILL and INDERDEEP BAINS recount their awful stories.



FROM BRIGHT, HAPPY CHILD, TO LOST SOUL





A classroom swot, Girl A was a ‘bright and happy child’ from a loving home.

Then, aged 12, she turned into a ‘lost soul’.

Within a few short months, she was playing truant, self-harming and going missing for days on end.

Her bewildered parents begged her to tell them what was wrong, and why she had cigarette burns on her arms and blood stains on her underwear.

Sickening: Brothers Anjum Dogar, left, and Akhtar Dogar, right, have been convicted of offences involving underage girls



Their once-diligent daughter simply shrugged off their questions.

Whenever she failed to come home, her father wandered the streets of Oxford bearing her photo as he searched in vain in pubs, nightclubs and cinemas.

Her mother said she felt a failure, and recalled: ‘There was no emotion left in her whatsoever. She didn’t laugh. She didn’t cry.’

Their daughter would return home refusing to say where she had been. Often, her lips were cracked, her skin was filthy and her hair was matted.

Her parents repeatedly reported her missing to police, and begged social services for help, but were met with indifference – and after 70 occasions, they lost count.

Eventually her father was actually asked by police to stop looking for her – astonishingly because officers ‘felt it was detrimental to her wellbeing’.

It was only years later, at the Old Bailey, that Girl A revealed the full horror.

Abuse was carried out at the Nanford Guest House in Oxford. Pictured is a room at the guest house

She told how she had informed police and social workers several times that she was being abused – even showing them her cigarette burn injuries – yet was ignored.

Her grooming had begun gradually but they soon proffered alcohol, drugs and places to ‘chill’ away from home. She enjoyed the attention, and thought it was ‘exciting’.

Before long, they were luring her into sex and taking her to ‘parties’.

She said: ‘By parties, I mean everybody coming and having sex with me.’

She was eventually taken into care, to the relief of her ‘heartbroken’ parents, who hoped she would at last be safe. But if anything, she became less so.

Difficult: The girls braved a hostile interrogation in court in order to help convict their attackers. This picture is posed by a model

Her abusers brazenly came to pick her up from the care home – staff simply let her walk out the front door.



She even told police a 25-year-old man, Akhtar Dogar, was forcing her to have sex.

The reaction from police? ‘They threatened on a number of occasions to arrest me for wasting police time,’ is the heart-stopping answer given by Girl A.

She is now 21, having rescued herself from her horrific life by walking away, going to college and finding a job. But as she puts it: ‘Adults should be doing their jobs. It is not down to a child.’







SHE WAS TOLD SHE WOULD BE SHOT

Girl B was told she would be shot if she did not have sex with men when she was 14.

Predators would wait for her near her children’s home and she would be driven to various places where she would be plied with drink and drugs in order to be raped or sold to other men.

She said Akhtar Dogar threatened her when she refused to perform a sex act, telling jurors: ‘He said if I didn’t do what I was told he knew someone who would shoot me.’



Convicted: Brothers Mohammed Karrar, left, Bassam Karrar, right, were found guilty at the Old Bailey



Once, when Girl B and Girl A returned together to their care home in a taxi, staff refused to pay the fare – and the driver drove Girl A back to the gang who raped her.

In August 2006, she was taken to a flat off Rectory Road, Oxford, and rang police after realising she was with 11 men who wanted to have sex with her.



TREATED LIKE A PRINCESS, TURNED INTO AN ADDICT



Gradually turned against her family, Girl C ended up being given drink and drugs and forced to have sex with strangers while being filmed at the age of 13.

Incredibly, even after being taken into the supposed ‘care’ of Oxfordshire County Council, she was groomed, raped and trafficked under the noses of staff.

Girl C’s miserable life had begun with abuse, and she was taken away and adopted.

Zeeshan Ahmed, left, and Kamar Jamil, right, were among those convicted for the sickening crimes



But by the age of 12, she was running away from her adoptive home and drinking – making her easy prey to the Oxford paedophiles.

She revealed: ‘The grooming was so clever. At first, they treat you like a princess. They make you feel wanted, cared for, and ask you about your life and your family.

‘They buy you gifts. That goes on for about six months, by which time they know exactly what to say to get under your skin.’

The gang got her addicted to crack cocaine, and then heroin. They trafficked her across the country to be raped by strangers.

Her adoptive mother spent two years begging the council for help.

Assad Hussain was cleared of raping Child A but convicted of having sex with a child

Eventually, the council agreed to place the girl in temporary care – where the very people paid to protect her simply ignored her desperate plight.

According to her adoptive mother, staff at a children’s home actually bought ‘sexy underwear’ and stiletto-heeled boots for the girl, despite knowing she was being sold for sex.

She visited home one day wearing ‘a hideous lacy black and red corset’, said her mother, who add: ‘She lay on her bed and sucked her thumb and we sang nursery rhymes to try to soothe her.’

Girl C said of the staff: ‘I tried to tell two members of staff all the things that had been happening to me but they told me it was inappropriate to have the conversation at that time.’

One night in November 2006, at the Nanford Guest House in Oxford – the gang’s favoured lair – a cocaine-fuelled Bassam Karrar raped her twice, strangled and beat her, all while subjecting her to verbal abuse and threats to kill.

She managed to escape naked into the street.

During the trial, she was cross-examined by Karrar’s QC, Mark Milliken-Smith, who suggested her account was ‘lie upon lie because you’d been caught by police naked in a hotel room with a man you were not supposed to be with’.



He added: ‘You cried rape, didn’t you?’



Aged 16, she fell pregnant by one of her abusers, and after her son was born the ruthless gang threatened to behead the boy unless she recruited younger girls into the same cycle of abuse.

She was eventually rescued by her adoptive mother, who moved her halfway across the country with her son.













THEY PHYSICALLY BRANDED HER FLESH

Groomed from the age of 11, Girl D was turned into a sex slave by an older man who loaned her out for £600 a time.

In a now familiar pattern, Mohammed Karrar plied her with drink and drugs, and declared his undying love.

The seven members of the gang face lengthy prison sentences

The brain-washing was so effective, she believed he cared even when he raped her.

The sick brute physically branded her flesh so other abusers would ‘know I was his’, she recalled.

When she was 12 she was gang-raped by four cocaine-addled men on a kitchen table.

Men would call her ‘our baby girl’, and inject her with heroin.

Her torment ended only aged 15 when she was moved into a foster family away from Oxford.



SHE WROTE ‘HELP’ ALL OVER HER BODY



Girl E loved school and was a ‘teacher’s pet’ before becoming ensnared by the men when she was just 12.

Like many of the others, she became a sex slave at the grubby Nanford Guest house.

Girl E’s mother said she had reported her daughter missing more than a hundred times.

She said yesterday: ‘We did everything we could to try and keep her indoors and away from them.

‘We would lock all the doors and windows at night. We were so desperate.



‘I was on the phone to [social services] every day. We needed help but didn’t get it.

‘They knew what was going and knew she was being taken to that guesthouse.’

The girl, now 16, is living in secure accommodation for her own safety.