Diversity Macht Frei

February 26, 2016

Corrupt police and an influential politician fuelled a culture of impunity that allowed three brothers to “own” the town of Rotherham and abuse children until their crimes were exposed by The Times.

One officer had sex with under-age girls, passed drugs to the sex-grooming gang and tipped them off when colleagues were searching for missing children, a court was told. Another helped to broker a deal in which one brother returned an abused girl to police after receiving an assurance that he “wouldn’t get done”.

The jury was told that Jahangir Akhtar, the former deputy leader of Rotherham council, also took part in the handover at a petrol station. Mr Akhtar, the former deputy chairman of South Yorkshire police and crime panel, was a relative of Arshid, Basharat and Bannaras Hussain, who behaved for years “like a pack of animals” to pursue dozens of young girls before demanding sex, often with threats of violence.

As their trial ended yesterday, it was revealed that the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) had begun 55 investigations into alleged police misconduct linked to Rotherham child sex crimes. It has received complaints against 92 named officers.

An investigation into all past sex grooming cases in the town, begun in June and led by the National Crime Agency, has identified more than 300 suspects and 9,000 lines of inquiry. Children lured into the Hussain brothers’ web of alcohol, drugs, guns and cars believed that the wealthy trio, known as Ash, Bash and Bono, were above the law. It was a perception aided by the wilful blindness of child protection authorities, Sheffield crown court was told.

No criminal inquiry into the brothers’ offending was launched until The Times revealed in 2013 that police and social services held, but had failed to act on, detailed intelligence that Arshid Hussain was among a small group of men suspected of sexually exploiting more than 40 under-age girls.

Less than two weeks later, Rotherham council commissioned an independent inquiry by Alexis Jay, a social services expert, which found that 1,400 girls in the South Yorkshire town were groomed and abused over 16 years. The offenders were “almost all” men of Pakistani heritage.

… One officer, said by a witness to have had sex with girls and to have passed drugs to Arshid Hussain, is under investigation by his own force and by the IPCC, the jury was told. He denies wrongdoing. The officer allegedly involved in the petrol station handover, PC Hassan Ali, died in February last year. He was fatally injured in a traffic collision on the day he was told that he was under investigation.

Between them, the two officers accessed police intelligence databases “without apparent legitimate policing purpose” on at least nine occasions between 2006 and 2011, the court was told. They searched each time for information about the Hussain brothers.