A ringleader of the Rochdale child sex abuse ring has been ‘throwing parties’ at his home amid long-running efforts to deport him from the UK, neighbours say.
Qari Rauf, 55, who was released in 2017 after serving two-and-a-half years of his six-year prison sentence, was stripped of his dual British citizenship following his conviction.
A judge ordered his deportation but it was thwarted after he renounced his Pakistani citizenship and tore up his passport days before a hearing about the case.
Pakistan refused to take the now ‘stateless’ paedophile saying there was ‘no basis to accept’ him and fellow ringleader Adil Khan, who is in a similar situation.
Rauf is still living in the same part of Rochdale where victims were targeted, reportedly with official protection including a ‘panic button’ linked to Greater Manchester Police.
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One neighbour, mum-of-two Angie Harrison, said she has seen ‘loads of people’ entering his house for parties and saw someone ‘taking photos out the back window’.
She told MailOnline: ‘The street is full of kids. I am constantly checking and checking.
‘It is horrible. It is awful when you have to sit out watching your kids. We’re the ones watching over our own kids like prison guards.’
Others said he ‘walks around here like he owns the place’ and is living comfortably, having been taken back by his wife, and is frequently seen hanging out with his son.
British officials are in talks with their Pakistani counterparts to have him deported, with fresh developments last week.
Last week a Pakistani official said the country could change its stance if the UK allows Pakistani airlines to operate direct flights to the UK.
They were banned four years ago following the discovery that dozens of Pakistani flights had been piloted by people with fake licenses.
British officials say the row cannot be used for leverage on the Pakistani airline ban as it’s a ‘technical and independent’ matter based on safety concerns.
The UK Civil Aviation Authority recently said ‘no significant progress’ has been made on the issue.
Rauf was part of a nine-strong gang of men of Pakistani heritage who sexually assaulted 47 girls, some as young as 12, after luring them with alcohol and drugs.
An independent review of wider child sex abuse and exploitation last year found ‘compelling evidence’ that 111 cases in Rochdale between 2004 and 2013 were not properly investigated despite warnings.
A report by Baroness Casey recently weighed into long-debated issues around the ethnic make-up of grooming gangs in the UK.
Last week Lady Casey said she found evidence of ‘over-representation’ of men of Pakistani and Asian heritage among suspects in Greater Manchester, West and South Yorkshire, where police forces gathered data on ethnicity in such cases.
Robust data had not been collected consistently across the rest of the UK she said, arguing that authorities had ‘shied away’ from the ethnicity of offenders.
Her report also looked at 12 live investigations and found ‘a significant proportion appear to involve suspects who are non-UK nationals’, including asylum claimants.
The home secretary, Yvette Cooper, said ‘ignoring the issues, not examining and exposing them to the light, allows the criminality and depravity of a minority of men to be used to marginalise whole communities’.
She told MPs more than 1,000 grooming gang cold cases are expected to be reviewed by police in the coming weeks.
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