‘My only crime was to be Muslim’

Despite being warned by trial judge Mushtaq Khokhar not to reveal his previous convictions to the jury, Shabir Ahmed ignored the advice.

Throughout the trial Ahmed ranted at jurors that his convictions in the child sex scandal had been a “conspiracy by the police, English Defence League (EDL), British National Party (BNP) and social services” and added that he had instructed his barrister, Simon Nichol, to appeal the sentence.

Ahmed said: “I will never accept that verdict here or tomorrow.

“Myself along with my countrymen were convicted — this was conspiracy by the police. It had nothing to do with justice.

“Let’s pick on the weakest segment of the community — the Asian community. We were all innocent.

“This was the Rochdale grooming case. The girls were already selling their bodies. No Pakistani went knocking on the doors in Heywood saying ‘have you got any young girls, can we have sex with them?’”

He went on to complain that he and his colleagues had been arrested, questioned and released over six months without being charged.

“Then all of a sudden they concocted something else and I got charged. My only crime was to be Muslim — not of the majority race,” he added.

He complained at being taken to Liverpool — a city having its “hands red with blood of the black people, a city that traded in slavery, took on slaves and dumped black slaves in the sea.”


Grooming case failings are still being probed

Failings in the way the authorities handled the Rochdale sex abuse ring that Ahmed led continue to be investigated.

A report by MPs found “serious weaknesses” in England’s care system with children’s homes failing to protect runaways. The investigation found placing youngsters far from home could encourage them to abscond and leave them at risk of sexual abuse — as happened in the Rochdale case.

Rochdale MP Simon Danczuk said: “These vulnerable girls went to hell and back, both in terms of what they experienced at the hands of their abusers but also in terms of the court case that they had to go through.”