Two members of the notorious Rochdale grooming gang have lost a seven-year-long legal battle against their deportation to Pakistan. The two Pakistani men were among the nine convicted and jailed in 2012 for a series of sexual offenses involving young girls.
The two men, Qari Abdul Rauf, 53, and Adil Khan, 51, are Pakistani nationals residing in the UK. The then-home secretary of the UK, Theresa May, had ordered their deportation to Pakistan. The pair mounted a legal challenge against it, arguing that it was an infringement of their human rights.
The pair said that they had renounced their Pakistani citizenship prior to their arrest, and the court ordering their deportation would render them stateless.
In a ruling on Wednesday, the court decided that it was in “very strong public interest” to deport the two men as soon as possible. The immigration judges Charlotte Welsh and Siew Link Yoke said that Adil Khan had shown an unprecedented lack of remorse for his involvement in the Rochdale grooming gang that abused as many as 47 young girls between 2008 and 2010.
The Rochdale grooming gang, based in the eponymous town in the UK, was a nine-member group of child sexual abusers cornered by the police in 2012. The gang members, comprising Afghan and Pakistani nationals, were sentenced to several years of imprisonment by the court.
Adil Khan, who was jailed for eight years, was incriminated for trafficking a 15-year-old girl to his friends for sexual exploitation. Whenever the girl protested or resisted their advances, they beat him. The trial also revealed that Khan had gotten a 13-year-old girl pregnant and refused he was the father.
Khan, however, denied the grooming offences, arguing that the trial was “racially motivated.” In his defence, he said he could not have groomed anyone because he could not speak English.
Qari Abdul Rauf was jailed for six years after he was convicted of trafficking a 15-year-old for sexual exploitation. He served for two years and six months and was released in 2014.
The UK Home Office lawyers now argue that the case has gone for too long and cost an estimated £550,000 in public money.