George Lowe has spent almost 18 years reliving the terrible night that his wife Eileen and their two teenage daughters were murdered. Woken just after 3.30am by the piercing sound of a smoke alarm, he opened his bedroom door and was immediately knocked back by a wall of thick, acrid smoke.

Unable to make it across the landing, where Eileen, 49, was sleeping with their disabled elder daughter Sarah (the 17-year-old was afraid of the dark and often needed comforting at night), he returned to the bedroom, pulled on some trousers and clambered out of the window.

In ‘complete shock’, George banged on the next-door neighbour’s door. They called the fire brigade but, as he recalled this week, ‘with fire that strong, it was too late’.

The 56-year-old deliveryman was in the Princess Royal Hospital in Telford when he learned the fire had killed both Eileen and Sarah. Also dead was his younger daughter, Lucy, who was 16 and had been trapped in a third bedroom.

The only other family member to survive was Lucy’s 15-month-old daughter Tasnim, who was found wrapped in a blanket in the garden.

Lucy Lowe was 16 and pregnant with her second child when she was murdered alongside her sister Sarah, 17, and their mother Eileen, 49, in a house fire in Telford set by Lucy's boyfriend, Azhar Ali Mehmood

Lucy’s boyfriend Azhar Ali Mehmood — a Pakistani immigrant who was the baby girl’s father and had been visiting that night — escaped with minor injuries.

In the days that followed the tragedy in August 2000, police said the deadly fire had almost certainly been started deliberately. Traces of petrol were found on the downstairs carpets of the terraced property in a leafy cul-de-sac in Leegomery, a working-class area of Telford.

Initially there was speculation that the attack was racially motivated. There was talk of it being a ‘hate crime’ perpetrated by thugs opposed to Lucy and Azhar’s mixed-race relationship.

In the event, a different — and far more sinister — story emerged.

First, CCTV footage from a nearby garage emerged showing Lucy’s boyfriend buying petrol minutes before the fire began.

Then neighbours told police they’d heard the couple arguing furiously earlier that night, and seen him loitering outside the building as the blaze took hold.

Mehmood was soon charged with three counts of murder and one of attempted murder. After a short trial at Stafford Crown Court in October 2001, he was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment, with a minimum of 18 years.

Among many troubling facts presented to the jury during the trial was that Mehmood — who Lucy’s mother and father believed was a teenager — had actually been an adult in his mid-20s.

Appallingly, it emerged that he’d first slept with Lucy when she was just 14 years old and he was a 24-year-old taxi driver. He got her pregnant with Tasnim shortly afterwards.

That made him guilty of child rape. Yet the local authority — which registered Tasnim’s birth and provided Lucy, as an underage mother, with support from social services — had done nothing to stop what was an illegal and exploitative relationship.

Indeed, Lucy was pregnant for a second time when she died.

No one had seen fit to inform Lucy’s parents that their child’s ‘boyfriend’ was actually a decade older than her, either.

‘He looked pretty young,’ recalls her father George. ‘It wasn’t until Lucy died that we found out that he was actually almost twice her age, and seemed to have a wife and children back in Pakistan.

‘It was a complete shock.

‘If we had known then, like any parents, we’d have tried to stop it. But we were kept in the dark. Social services said nothing. The police showed no interest, despite it being rape, a crime.

‘To this day, I still ask myself: why did they do nothing?’

Why indeed. Yet despite George’s palpable anger, no inquiry was held. Mehmood was never charged with a sexual offence, either, and no serious attempt was ever made to establish what, exactly, had gone wrong. In the eyes of the authorities, Lucy Lowe was, in other words, forgotten.

Until now, that is. For this week, George Lowe’s teenage daughter emerged as a key figure in what is being described as the worst abuse scandal in British history.

Azhar Ali Mehmood was later jailed for life after being convicted of three counts of murder – but was never arrested or charged over sex abuse (pictured: Lowe's family home after fire)

Lucy was named as one of three girls from Telford who are believed to have died after falling into the clutches of brutal sex gangs who have been preying on young teenage girls in the small Shropshire town, with virtual impunity, for almost 40 years.

Up to 1,000 children, according to one expert analysis, are thought to have been abused during that time by the network of local men, most of whom worked for taxi firms and in fast food restaurants.

Other victims included Rebecca Watson, a 13-year-old who was killed in a car accident in 2002, and Vicky Round, who died in a drug incident after a grooming gang got her hooked on crack cocaine at the age of 12.

Crucially, in an echo of similar scandals that have blighted Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford and a string of towns and cities across the UK, the vast majority of victims have tended, like Lucy, to come from white, working-class families.

Their abusers, meanwhile, have hailed predominantly from the Pakistani community.

As a result, police, schools, councils and social services have repeatedly been accused of failing to properly investigate the abuse for fear of being accused of Islamophobia.

Such appallingly misguided political correctness has, of course, been the subject of fierce criticism and sparked much soul-searching in political circles.

It has spawned a number of high-profile reports, most notably social worker and academic Alexis Jay’s 2014 inquiry into the Rotherham scandal.

Her report concluded that an astonishing 1,400 children as young as 11 had been lured into sex slavery in the Yorkshire town, largely by Muslim men. Some had guns pointed at them, or were doused with petrol and threatened with being set alight if they did not prostitute themselves. Others were plied with drugs and alcohol before being gang raped.

Though rumours of such vile activity had for years been reaching the authorities, whistle-blowers were routinely silenced because council staff ‘feared appearing racist’.

Professor Jay found that three separate reports highlighting the abuse were ‘suppressed or ignored’ because the local authority was ‘in denial’.

One council worker in Rotherham who attempted to raise the alarm was even told ‘you must never refer to Asian men’ when talking about the systematic abuse, before being sent for diversity training.

I spent this week in Telford, meeting victims of abuse and their families, along with local abuse campaigners and politicians. And the chilling truth is that almost everyone believes that this quiet Shropshire town is another Rotherham — and, what’s more, that widespread abuse is still going on.

Take ‘Susannah’, a single mother of three teenage girls who contributes to a local Facebook page campaigning against child abuse.

She recently moved home, away from the suburb of Hadley, after growing ‘seriously concerned’ at sexualised comments being directed at her 14-year-old daughter by gangs of Asian men loitering in the street.

‘It got to the point when she couldn’t walk 400 yards to the shop without being spoken to in ways I found inappropriate,’ Susannah says.

Another mother, ‘Charlie’, who also contributes to the site, has banned her daughter from attending under-age discos held monthly at a nightclub in a working-class area of Wellington, in Telford, after witnessing ‘car-loads of adult men, loitering outside, trying to lure girls into their cars at chucking out time’.

Then there is Anthony Wood, who was in the same class as Lucy Lowe at Charlton School, the town’s biggest comprehensive.

He is organising a protest, Justice for the Telford Girls, next Saturday in the town centre aimed at shaming the authorities into taking the grooming scandal seriously. ‘I know of at least five girls in my year at Charlton who were going out with much older Pakistani men — girls who only realised years later that they were being exploited,’ he says.

‘It’s still going on. Drive around council estates in the evening, and you’ll see bus stops where men in taxis are openly picking up teenage girls. No one is looking out for them. If these girls came from upper class or middle class parts of town, it would never be allowed to happen.’ Almost everyone you meet is rightly anxious to stress that the vast majority of their town’s small Muslim community are decent and entirely law abiding citizens.

Mehmood (pictured) first slept with Lucy when she was just 14 years old and he was a 24-year-old taxi driver. Lucy's father George has said he had no idea how old Mehmood was, and the local authority did not tell him

They add that Telford, a conurbation of villages originally turned into a ‘new town’ in the 1960s, has never historically experienced racial problems, partly because (unlike Rotherham, Bradford, Rochdale and other towns affected by grooming scandals) it has experienced very little immigration. Today, a mere five per cent of the population is Asian, according to census figures.

Yet many believe the failure of authorities to properly hold to account those involved in grooming gangs will fuel ethnic tension.

Recent years, for example, have seen a number of protest marches in town organised by the far-Right English Defence League, a group whose leaders were recently jailed for inciting racial hatred. During one march its members stormed the town’s largest mosque.

Causing further consternation is the growing stench of a cover-up.

Telford Council, which has been run by Labour since 2011, finally caved into pressure this week to hold an independent inquiry into the scandal.

But even then its leader suggested that the inquiry would be banned from looking at events that took place in the eight years since his party took power.

It is unclear why — beyond a cynical effort to avoid criticism — this period ought to escape scrutiny. After all, it emerged this week that the council received 715 child sexual exploitation referrals between 2013 and 2016, but referred less than half of them to its own safeguarding team.

Meanwhile Telford’s Conservatives have what sources describe as ‘credible evidence’ that the council’s earlier internal inquiry in 2016 — an ‘internal scrutiny report’ into its handling of the scandal — was ‘seriously watered down’ before publication.

‘A number of damning statements included in draft copies of the report appear to have been removed before it saw the light of day,’ says a source.

Residents I spoke to were also outraged by claims from local police chief Tom Harding on TV on Wednesday that the scale of abuse was being ‘sensationalised’, not least because Home Office figures from 2016 reveal that their town has the highest rate of child sex abuse in Britain.

Later that day, his force sheepishly admitted that 46 children in Telford are, even now, formally classified as being ‘at risk’ of abuse.

The same police force in 2016 temporarily suspended its chaplain, Keith Osmund-Smith, for speaking out about the scandal. Meanwhile a worker with Axis Counselling, a police-funded charity helping sex abuse victims, was forced out of her job after trying to raise similar concerns.

Yesterday, the police’s efforts to play down the scandal were undermined by Telford’s Tory MP, Lucy Allan, who first raised the abuse scandal in Parliament this week. In an interview, she revealed that she has since been ‘inundated with emails saying “this has happened to me”.’

Grooming gangs have, in truth, been on the news agenda in Telford since 2012, when seven local Pakistani men were convicted of turning young white girls into ‘sexual commodities’ — who, in the words of prosecutors, were ‘passed around and used as meat’ — and sentenced to a total of almost 60 years in prison.

The ringleaders were Mubarek and Ahdel Ali, married brothers aged 29 and 24, who were found guilty of sexual abuse, trafficking, and prostitution of children. They were jailed for 14 and 18 years respectively. Another of the group, 31-year-old Mohammed Ali Sultan, was jailed for seven years for a number of rapes, including on a 13-year-old girl.

By chilling coincidence, he spent his teenage years at Charlton School with Lucy Lowe. All seven prosecutions stemmed from Operation Chalice, a major police investigation into child grooming in Telford.

In 2013, it was the subject of a hair-raising Dispatches television documentary in which victims told how they were lured into relationships which soon became coercive and violent.

One interviewee spoke of being ‘raped constantly’ for between ten and 13 hours. Several other girls, some as young as 13, said they were taken to filthy rooms above a curry house and sold to restaurant workers.

Over time, detectives working Operation Chalice — which focused on the two-year period between 2007 and 2009 — identified more than 100 victims and 200 perpetrators of abuse. Child brothels were raided above chip shops and a fried chicken outlet.

However, only nine abusers, including the seven jailed in 2012, were ever successfully prosecuted and the police inquiry was subsequently closed.

That leaves more than 190 abusers still unaccounted for.

Mubarek Ali, 34, (left) and his brother Ahdel Ali, 27, (right) from Telford were both jailed after sexually abusing young girls in a child sex abuse ring

What’s more, it begs the question of exactly how widespread child sexual exploitation was in the years that fell outside Operation Chalice’s small two-year window, along with why on Earth we should believe such behaviour has stopped.

Evidence unearthed this week suggests that abuse began in 1981, when two paedophiles began targeting girls in a local children’s home and trafficking them around the country.

It first crossed the agenda of social workers in Telford in the early 1990s, but it was a decade before any concerns were passed on to the police.

Previously unseen files, some disclosed under Freedom of Information legislation, reportedly show that council staff viewed abused and trafficked children as ‘prostitutes’, not victims, and that — in a depressing echo of Rotherham — they failed to properly investigate for fear of ‘racism’.

Meanwhile an internal police memo, sent to officers investigating child rape, emerged. In an astonishing turn of phrase (given the horrific nature of the crime) it stated that when young girls were being sexually abused by gangs of much older men, ‘in most cases the sex is consensual’.

A dozen victims, who were abused more recently, are said to have identified a ring of 70 perpetrators to a Sunday newspaper. One schoolgirl said that she fell pregnant six times in four years.

Based on these disclosures, Professor Liz Kelly, from the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit at London Metropolitan University, has estimated that 1,000 children were abused in Telford over a 40-year period. Since the town has just 170,000 residents, compared to Rotherham’s 260,000, that makes it the worst such scandal in British history.

All of which brings us back to Lucy Lowe. For this week, a resident of Telford using the pseudonym ‘Holly Archer’ gave a series of moving TV interviews explaining how she endured a ‘whirlwind of rape’ after being targeted by grooming gangs when she was just 14 years old.

Unbeknown to her parents, who were typically told she was visiting friends, Holly spent evenings after school having sex with multiple men, ‘night after night’ in ‘disgusting takeaways and filthy houses’.

She had two abortions after falling pregnant and said she was raped just ‘hours’ after her second termination. The ‘worst moment’ was when she was drugged and gang-raped just after her 16th birthday.

Holly is the author of a memoir called I Never Gave My Consent which tells how she fell into the gang’s clutches after Pakistani boys her own age sold her mobile number to its members.

Although she ‘hated what was happening, and my abusers made my skin crawl’, she didn’t dare speak out because the gang had made that threat to burn down her house. ‘Remember that name, Lucy Lowe,’ they told her.

At the trial of Lucy’s killer, back in 2001, prosecutors argued that the arson attack that killed her had taken place after a domestic argument between the couple, who had a tempestuous relationship.

Yet recent events, along with the testimony of victims such as Holly Archer, make George Lowe suspect that Azhar Mehmood wasn’t the only culprit involved. He instead believes the arson attack may have been linked to the activities of a larger grooming gang.

One witness, Mr Lowe recalls, ‘saw two people hanging around outside our house’ shortly after the fire was started. And in the ensuing days, a close relative of Mehmood disappeared to Pakistan.

‘There are just too many parallels between what happened to Lucy and what you hear about some of these other girls,’ he says. ‘So I think it all had something to do with this grooming lot. Maybe she was going to speak out, and they needed to silence her,’ he said.

Recently, as Lucy’s death returned to the headlines, George received a sinister phone call telling him to ‘be careful’ about making public comments about the scandal. As a result, he says police implemented security measures at his home.

Perhaps the one person who can shed light on it all is Mehmood himself. But don’t hold your breath: he has never accepted responsibility or apologised for his crimes. This year he will be eligible for release from prison — a move that George Lowe has pledged to vigorously oppose.

‘That man can still see his family but I can’t,’ he tells me. ‘Instead, I have to go to the cemetery.’ Like so many residents of this scandal-hit Midlands town, he’s still waiting for real justice to be done.