Section:GDN 1N PaGe:23 Edition Date:190829 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 28/8/2019 20:46 cYanmaGentaYellowb
Thursday 29 Aug ust 2019 The Guardian •
National^23
Helen Pidd
North of England editor
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 passing
them around for sex, Sheffi eld crown
court heard.
Masaued Malik, 35, Aftab Hussain,
40, Abid Saddiq, 38, Sharaz Hussain,
35, and two men aged 33 and 35 who
cannot be named for legal reasons,
were found guilty yesterday following
an eight-week trial. They will be sen-
tenced on 30 September. The off ences
relate to the abuse of seven girls aged
under 16 between 1998 and 2002.
Six more Rotherham
men found guilty of
child sexual abuse
▲ Four of the men convicted yesterday. Clockwise from top left: Abid Saddiq,
Aftab Hussain, Masaued Malik and Sharaz Hussain PHOTOGRAPHS: NCA/PA“The girls, who were all vulnerable
and craving attention and love, were
deliberately targeted for the sole pur-
pose 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 gratifi cation, and
were vulnerable because of their need
to be loved. All seven suff er the emo-
tional eff ects 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. They would often act as
a group, happy to share girls around
amongst each other.” The six men, all
from Rotherham, were remanded in
custody by Judge Michael Slater.
Aftab Hussain was found guilty oftwo 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 defendants, who can-
not 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 Rother-
ham between 1997 and 2013. The NCA
was invited in following the Jay report
in 2014, which outlined the scale of the
off ending 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 look-
ing to increase this as it works towards
recruiting a staff of 250. The agency
said it has now engaged with 313
alleged victims and survivors in the
town and has identifi ed 190 suspects.
Asked how many years the oper-
ation will take, the NCA’s regional head
of investigations, Rob Burgess, said it
would ‘‘take as long as it does. We are
very conscious of the cost of an investi-
gation like this and we are very careful
about how we proceed.”RELEASED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws