Grooming Gang Rape Victim: Mohammed Ali Sultan and Shahmeel Khan Turned Me into an Inhuman ‘Sex Thing’

Mohammed Ali Sultan
West Mercia Police
Kurt Zindulka

A victim of Birmingham and Telford grooming gang rapists has waived her anonymity to shed light on the horrors of she experienced at the hands of Shahmeel Khan and Mohammed Ali Sultan and to raise awareness about the impact of England’s predominantly Muslim grooming gangs.

Lauren Elysia Priddey has gone public about the traumatic experiences she went through as an 18-year-old, saying that she does not “want to keep what happened to me a secret any more”.

In 2007, Priddey was raped by Shahmeel Khan, who burst into her flat just days before she was due to take her A-Level exams.

“He was violent and unpredictable — like a loose cannon. A ticking timebomb,” she told the Birmingham Mail.

Two days after the first rape, the cousin of her attacker, Mohammed Ali Sultan — who was later revealed to be a leader of a grooming gang — also raped and abused the young woman.

“When Sultan came round two days after the rape I was still in shock, still traumatised. I had no fight left in me,” she said.

“He used to say he would make my life hell and said I didn’t want to play games with him. He would say he would kick my door in and when I said ‘you won’t because of the locks’, he said ‘I will kick your head in then’,” Lauren added.

Lauren said that the trauma sent her into a spiral of drug abuse and sexual abuse from other ‘Asian’ grooming gang members, being passed around to as many as ten different men per day.

“They degraded me to the point where I’d become this sex thing, this thing that wasn’t human, but just an object, to the point where I believed that’s what I was,” she said.

“Some survivors like me managed to escape that lifestyle. Other survivors are caught up in that lifestyle for years and years, becoming prostitutes or drug addicts,” Priddey explained, adding: “Lives ruined for life, losing their kids, etc.”

She later gave evidence against Shahmeel Khan and Mohammed Ali Sultan at court, leading to their convictions. Khan was handed a ten-year sentence, while Sultan was given a six-year term, later being jailed for an additional eight years in 2019 for the rape of a 13-year-old girl.

Priddey went on to write an anonymous account of her experiences in the book No Way Out, which led to a campaign of online abuse.

“One troll told me to commit suicide, to cut my wrists. He said I must be really depressed knowing all I’d ever been valued for,” she said.

“I was just really angry because I am luckily not in that place but it might have pushed someone else over the edge. I reported him to Twitter but as far as I know he was not even banned,” she added.

Lauren said that “for a long time I’ve been keeping my past separate from my friends, from my workplace — trying to pretend to be somebody I’m not. But I want to feel good about myself and say ‘Yes, this is me — look at my achievements.'”

She said that a main motivating factor in her coming forward is to help prevent further grooming gang attacks on children.

“This is happening to 12, 13-year-old girls and they have a right to be informed,” she said.

Lauren Elysia Priddey has gone on to work as a senior nurse assisting people experiencing mental health crises. She has also launched a crowdfunding campaign to help other victims of grooming gangs, which you can donate to here.

Follow Kurt on Twitter at @KurtZindulka

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