A woman allegedly used as a ‘sex slave’ by a Rotherham grooming gang at the age of 13 told police she would close her eyes and ‘pray it was over’.
She told the court she can still clearly visualisethe burliest of her assailants bearing down on her.
Giving evidence during the trial of an alleged grooming gang from Rochdale, Greater Manchester, Girl B described one of the men, alleged to be Kashir Bashir, now 50, as being a huge, bushy-haired man with an enormous stomach, massive nose and big lips.
‘He just looks aggressive,’ she told a detective interviewing her in 2021. ‘He didn’t have a soft face. It was just like stern. With him I felt like it wasn’t right’.
A jury at Minshull Street Crown Court, Manchester, watched on a TV monitor as the alleged victim gave her evidence in a specialist interview room. She was sitting perched on a black leather sofa, her hands mostly clasped in front of her. Occasionally she scratched at her fingertips.
Girl B is one of two girls said to have been subjected to a series of sexual offences by eight Asian men between 2001 and 2006. The prosecution say they were attacked in parks, cars, disused warehouses and alleyways after being plied with alcohol and drugs.
Their abusers expected them to have sex with them ‘whenever and wherever the men wanted’.
In her 2021 interview Girl B told the interviewing detective that Bashir, whom she thought owned a shoe stall on Rochdale market, would have sex with her on a bed in the front bedroom of a house the group had taken her too.
‘The one thing I do remember (is) the guy who owned the shoe stall. He was heavy. I can literally feel him on top of me, even now. I can see him on top of me. I can see him in the corner of the room. I remember it hurting. He was big and so I didn’t want to do it. He was the one I didn’t want to be near.
Mohammed Zahid, 64, another of the alleged group, had a nearby stall on the same market selling socks, underwear and lingerie.
In contrast to Bashir, he was a softly-spoken man who spoke predominantly Pakistani with few words in English.
‘He never shouted. He spoke dead soft, like he actually gave a crap. He wasn’t nasty. He never looked pissed off, never. He was a soft guy.
‘There was a part of me that thought he was a nice guy who cared. He obviously wasn’t, but that’s the way he came over to me at the time. He had a pot belly and wispy hair. He smoked cigarettes really weirdly.
‘I felt close to him at the time. I felt the others were taking the piss, but not him’.
The woman, who at the time was living in a children’s home, recalled having sex with a succession of Asian men, sometimes on a dirty mattress in the basement of a fashion store in Rochdale. She would go downstairs, undress and wait for the men to join her in turn.
‘I was just lying there and hoping they would hurry up,’ she told the detective. ‘I would close my eyes and pray it was over. I just wanted it done. I’d literally lie there and they would have sex with me. I would not say no. I would just like there’.
The officer, who is out of camera shot, asks: ‘So Bashir had sex with you when you were a 13-year-old child?’
Twenty years on, the alleged victim pauses before replying in a whisper: ‘Yeah’.
The eight men are accused of numerous historic grooming sex offences against Girl A and Girl B. These include rape, indecent assault and indecency with a child.
Rossano Scamardecca KC, prosecuting, has told the jury: ‘Their treatment at the hands of these predators was appalling. They were children passed around for sex – abused, degraded and then discarded.
‘The defendants were only too aware of their tender ages and the difficulties they experienced with day-to-day life. It was obvious they craved the attention their home lives and families did not provide. That made them easy prey for older men to exploit’.
Jurors heard that despite contact with the local authority no action was taken to stop what was happening to the girls or to stop other similarly vulnerable children suffering the same fate.
Mohammed Zahid, 64, of Crumpsall, Manchester, Naheem Akram, 48, of Rochdale, Mohammed Shahzad, 43, of Rochdale, Nisar Hussain, 43, of Rochdale, Roheez Khan, 39, of Rochdale, Arfan Khan, 40, of Rochdale, Mushtaq Ahmed, 66, of Oldham, and Kashir Bashir, 50, of Oldham, deny all the charges.