Seven men were convicted on Friday in the UK’s latest grooming trial, after jurors heard that two girl victims were forced to have sex “with multiple men on the same day, in filthy flats and on rancid mattresses.”
Jurors at the court in Manchester, northwest England, deliberated for three weeks before finding the seven men, all of whom are of South Asian descent, guilty of rape.
Mohammed Zahid, 64, Mushtaq Ahmed, 67, Kasir Bashir, 50, Mohammed Shahzad, 44, Naheem Akram, 48, Roheez Khan, 39, and Nisar Hussain, 41, will be sentenced at a later date, but judge Jonathan Seely warned that they face “lengthy prison sentences”.
They were all remanded in custody, except Bashir, who absconded before the trial began.
The men were prosecuted as part of Operation Lytton, an investigation launched by Greater Manchester Police in 2015 into years of child sexual exploitation in Rochdale, a town near Manchester.
Over the course of several decades, men of mostly South Asian origin in various English towns are suspected of having sexually abused thousands of mostly white girls from working-class families, often from troubled homes.
