Offences relate to abuse of seven girls who were under 16 between 1998 and 2002

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Six more men from Rotherham have been convicted of grooming and abusing vulnerable girls in the South Yorkshire town as part of the largest child sexual exploitation and abuse inquiry in the UK.

The men would park outside local schools or hang around in Rotherham bus station, waiting for immature girls who “needed to be loved”. Working as a gang, the men would give the girls alcohol and drugs before they were sexually abused, Sheffield crown court heard.

Masaued Malik, 35, Aftab Hussain, 40, Abid Saddiq, 38, Sharaz Hussain, 35, plus two men aged 33 and 35 who cannot be named for legal reasons, were found guilty on Wednesday after an eight-week trial. They will be sentenced on 30 September.

The offences relate to the abuse of seven girls who were under 16 between 1998 and 2002.

“The girls, who were all vulnerable and craving attention and love, were deliberately targeted for the sole purpose of becoming sexual objects for the men. At the time, none of them had the maturity to understand they were being groomed and exploited, believing that sex was some kind of ‘necessary price’ for friendship,” said the National Crime Agency (NCA), which has been investigating child sexual exploitation in Rotherham.

“They were given alcohol and drugs, belittled and passed around to other men for their gratification, and were vulnerable because of their need to be loved. All seven suffer the emotional effects of the abuse to this day.

“All the men lived in Rotherham and the surrounding areas and associated with one another at the time the abuse took place. A feature of their sexual offending was they would often act as a group, happy to share girls around amongst each other.”

The six men, who are all from Rotherham, were remanded in custody by the judge, Michael Slater.

Aftab Hussain was found guilty of two indecent assault charges.

Saddiq was found guilty of two counts of rape, four counts of indecent assault and two counts of child abduction.

Malik was found guilty of three indecent assaults.

Sharaz Hussain was found guilty of four indecent assaults.

One of the two defendants who cannot be named was found guilty of two indecent assaults and the other found guilty of one indecent assault and two counts of child abduction.

The verdicts mean that 20 men have now been convicted since the NCA took over the investigation of child sexual exploitation cases in Rotherham dating from between 1997 and 2013.

The NCA was invited in following the Jay report, which shocked the nation in 2014 when it outlined the scale of the offending against children in the town.

The agency now has more than 200 people working on Operation Stovewood, making it the largest child sexual exploitation and abuse inquiry in the UK. It had a budget last year of just under £12m, and is seeking to increase this as it works towards recruiting a staff of 250.

The agency said it had now engaged with 313 alleged victims and survivors in the town and had identified 190 suspects.

Asked how many years the operation would take, the NCA’s regional head of investigations, Rob Burgess, said: “Putting a time on it is not right, it’s not fair in those circumstances.

“This is about pursuing the investigation to a point where, effectively, we’ve no longer got any victims that we can deal with. And, in reality that will take as long as it does. I would say that we are very conscious of the cost of an investigation like this and we are very careful about how we proceed.”