Grooming Gang Leader Served as a Council Welfare Rights Officer While Raping Young Girls

The head of an infamous Pakistani child sex grooming gang has been revealed to have been serving as a welfare rights officer for the local government council, a major child sex abuse report has revealed.

Shabir Ahmed, who led the Muslim Rochdale child rape gang, has been identified as “Offender A” by Sky News in a child sexual exploitation in Oldham report this month, which showed that while he was abusing children, he was employed by the local Labour-run council. Despite the Greater Manchester Police force being aware of allegations against Ahmed and his position as a welfare officer for the council, the police force failed to notify the council.

Shabir Ahmed

The convicted paedophile, who was jailed for 22 years for preying on vulnerable girls in the Northern English city of Rochdale, and for raping a young Asian girl 30 times for over a decade, was also revealed to have been dispatched by the council to the Oldham Pakistani Community Centre, where he would have had access to young children.

The report stated that if police had informed his employers of the rape allegations “it may have potentially avoided the tragic abuse of other children.”

Though the report claimed to have found no evidence of a coverup, it said that “some children had been failed by the agencies that were meant to protect them because child protection procedures had not been properly followed.”

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As has been seen in previous reports, fears of stoking racial tensions among the Greater Manchester Police force was a persistent issue.

The ‘Messenger’ service, which was established in 2006 to safeguard children from sexual abuse through a partnership of the local council, social workers, the children’s charity Barnardos, and the Greater Manchester Police was shown to have downplayed the role of ethnicity in the mostly Muslim Pakistani rape gang epidemic in the area.

According to the report, a 2012 “media strategy” developed by the service “articulated a concern that there could be assumptions in the media and the public at large that child sexual exploitation was carried out by men from ethnic minorities against White girls, which could create community tensions, and that Oldham’s Asian community could feel it was disproportionally associated with child sexual exploitation.”

“There were also, throughout this period, legitimate concerns by both the council and the police that the high-profile convictions of predominantly Pakistani offenders across the country could be capitalised on by a far-right agenda and lead to the victimisation of the Pakistani community,” the report added.

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