The Nine Times They Let Daddy Go

Who Protected Labour's Rape Gang Leader?

Deportation is a headline. Buried underneath it, just as with Operation Hexagon, sits the question no politician or mainstream media outlet dares ask. Who protected Shabir Ahmed while he raped children, and why.

Burnham will not touch that question. The Assurance Review in Oldham that he keeps pointing to as his record on the rape gangs was built from the outset so that it could not.

Ahmed was no stranger who slipped through a gap. He worked for Oldham Council from 1988 until 2006, a welfare rights officer seconded to the Oldham Pakistani Community Centre. He sat as a director of the local Citizens Advice Bureau. He carried a Labour Party card. In the Pakistani community of this town he was a heavyweight, a man with reach into the establishment that ran the place. When the BBC turned Rochdale into a drama the country learned his nickname. What the country was never told is that Daddy was one of theirs.

At trial he called the judge a racist and ran to Strasbourg complaining he had been treated unfairly. That is not the behaviour of a man who spent two decades expecting to be caught.

Burnham’s review into Ahmed could not compel a single witness. It could look only at the evidence placed in front of it. Its terms of reference were set by Oldham Council, the very body under examination. The very organisation where Ahmed worked, selling children from behind his desk at the council offices.

Burnham and his Labour Party did everything possible to prevent a National Inquiry. They knew that such a Public Inquiry would have the power to ask questions that would end careers. Just as they knew that, should the truth emerge, politicians would go to prison for what they did.

Here are the nine times Oldham Council and Greater Manchester Police let Daddy go. There are likely many more.

Occasion 1

In 2005 Greater Manchester Police were told of a serious allegation of child sexual abuse by Shabir Ahmed. The victim was an adult when officers saw her. The force was also made aware that Ahmed had contact with a young child living outside Oldham. GMP did not submit a crime report. That was a breach of the National Crime Recording Standard then in force. They did not inform the local authority responsible for that child. They did not notify Oldham Council, his employer. No risk assessment was carried out. No referral was made, no strategy discussion held, no Section 47 investigation opened. Ahmed was a council welfare rights officer with access to vulnerable adults and their children, and nobody checked what that access meant.

Employed by Oldham Council since 1988, Ahmed left his well paid position in 2006. The Council has never confirmed whether he went voluntarily after eighteen years, months after the first allegations of child sexual exploitation against him. Something does not add up.

Occasion 2

Ahmed was arrested for sexual assault on a child in February 2008. He was arrested again in July 2008 on suspicion of abducting two other children. GMP recorded no crime. Another breach of the National Crime Recording Standard. There is no evidence the force told Oldham Council so that it could weigh the risk he posed to any child he might reach.

Where Ahmed was working in February 2008 remains unclear. My information places him inside a community organisation with direct links to the Labour Party. A director of that organisation was later prosecuted. Public assets were sold off at discount prices to another of its directors.

Much of the public worry has fixed on whether Ahmed used his council job to reach children. My information is that he also used his role as a welfare officer to meet clients, and then pimped children out to them.

Occasion 3

GMP and Rochdale Council held strategy discussions about Ahmed in 2008. Oldham Council, his employer of eighteen years, was left out of them. Nothing in those discussions shows anyone considered the safeguarding of a child Ahmed might still have had contact with.

Occasion 4

Ahmed was charged with sexual assault at the end of September 2008. Oldham Council carried out no safeguarding assessment and made no contact with the police force. The review team could not establish whether GMP even told the Council it had charged a man it knew to be one of its own former employees.

Occasion 5

At the end of September 2008 the Probation Service notified Oldham Council that Ahmed had been charged with sexual assault. The Council did nothing with it. No assessment, no contact with GMP.

Then everything goes cold. Between September 2008 and December 2010 there is no record of when Ahmed faced trial for what he had been charged with, or of whether he was convicted of anything at all. Twenty seven months of silence in the official record. Nobody has ever explained it.

Occasion 6

An allegations management strategy meeting was held in Rochdale in December 2010. Oldham Council was not invited and was not told until January 2011. Once told, the Council assessed nothing.

Occasion 7

On 22 March 2011 Ahmed was charged with the rape of the child first brought to GMP six years earlier, in 2005. He was remanded into custody. On 1 April Oldham Council received a further Probation Service notification about the offences against that child. The scale of the abuse demanded a full assessment of Ahmed’s circumstances. None was done.

Up to that point, March 2011, Ahmed had been a free man. The ringleader of the Rochdale grooming gang was finally remanded not for Rochdale, but for the rape of a child six years earlier.

Occasion 8

That same month GMP asked Oldham Council for its files on Ahmed and his family. The request told the Council about the second child, the one identified in 2005, living outside the area, with whom Ahmed may have had close contact. That should have triggered a multi agency strategy discussion and an assessment of every other child he had been near. Oldham Council cannot locate a single record explaining why it never happened.

Occasion 9

In 2012 another young woman came forward. She had been abused by Ahmed as a child. GMP notified Oldham Council. Children’s social care closed the case within days without any assessment. The Council says it can find nothing further on her. GMP discontinued the matter on the basis that there was no realistic prospect of conviction. That was a police decision. It was never put to the Crown Prosecution Service. Neither GMP nor Oldham Council could assure the review team that the girl’s allegations, or her vulnerability, were dealt with at all.

They Interviewed No One

Andy Burnham’s expert review team found serious multiple failures by both Greater Manchester Police and Oldham Council to follow the procedures meant to protect children from Shabir Ahmed. Had those procedures been followed, his offending could have been stopped earlier and later children spared.

Ahmed’s network reached into the leading politicians of Oldham’s Pakistani and Bangladeshi community. The review team interviewed not one of them, and not one has volunteered what he was to them.

When I first exposed Ahmed’s real role inside the Council it came from a senior source inside the Labour Party. Everything that source gave me has since been proven, his membership and his access to children while on the council payroll. Daddy was well known to powerful people. Some of them sit in politics today. They knew exactly what he was and they looked away. People in this town are still frightened of what Daddy and his network can do to anyone who names them.

So whilst the mainstream media and their political masters want to focus on screaming deportation, I want to focus my attention somewhere more dangerous.

The National Inquiry is coming to Oldham. Shabir Ahmed must be summoned to testify. It is time we all learned just who it was that protected him. And yes, ask Andy Burnham if he denies it, Shabir Ahmed was protected and allowed to continue raping and trafficking little girls.

He was protected for the best part of a decade while he raped and sold the children of this town. The Inquiry carries the statutory power to compel the answer Oldham has been forbidden to ask. Who did the protecting, and what were they given for it.

Summon Daddy. Put him under oath in his own town and let him name every last one of them.

I’m Raja Miah MBE. For seven years, I led a campaign that exposed how senior Labour politicians helped protect Pakistani rape gangs. The people of my town EXPOSED ANDY BURNHAM and helped force the national inquiry.

You won’t see me on the BBC. You won’t read my work in the legacy press. That’s not an accident. I take this to a place from where there is no coming back.

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Raja Miah MBE