Grooming gang victims have described how police failed to act as paedophile Shahzad ‘Keith’ Khan raked in money selling their bodies to scores of abusers at a property dubbed ‘The Rape House’.
The Pakistani migrant, who died in 2015 aged 61, had targeted girls in the town since 1981, picking up at least one of his victims from under the noses of the authorities outside a police station on a regular basis, the Mirror reports.
“He’d pick me up right outside the police station in Wellington and sometimes police cars would drive past us,” she said.
“They must have realised something was very badly wrong but they never said a word, nor asked me what I was doing with a much older man.”
The scandal — barely covered by national broadcasters, including the publicly-funded BBC, despite being the worst in Britain’s history — saw up to a thousand girls beaten, raped, and even killed in a city of just 170,000, with Khan standing out as one of the most prolific abusers among hundreds of potential rapists.
His son Shahmeel was imprisoned briefly for an armed robbery and raping a schoolgirl studying for her A-levels, and his nephew Mohammed Ali Sultan also received a short term for abusing two girls — one aged just 13 — in 2012, and another in 2015 for two rapes and one attempted rape. (Criminals in Britain spend much of their supposed prison sentences on license rather than in custody.)
But Khan himself never faced justice, despite police being alerted to his activities as long ago as the mid-1990s.
“I told a police officer at Donnington Police Station what Khan was doing. I even told them that he’d offered my brother sex with an underage girl,” said the woman who first tipped off the authorities.
“Nothing was done. They told me they couldn’t prosecute him as they’d never have enough evidence. I got the feeling they were brushing me off.”
Reports by one of Khan’s child victims did not result in any charges, either.
Police officers and council workers in towns and cities plagued by grooming gangs have often been paralysed by fears that they will be accused of racism if they tackle the issue, as the overwhelming majority of convicted perpetrators are Muslims with Pakistani roots, while their victims are overwhelmingly from white working class backgrounds.
Indeed, a West Mercia Police memo is said to have made light of the abuse, which involved victims as young as 11, claiming that “in most cases the sex is consensual” — despite the age of consent in the United Kingdom being 16.
Underage victims in Rotherham were told not to mention the ethnicity of their abusers and “made to feel they were racist”, according to investigations, and in Somerset police actually dragged a victim to court when her rapist accused her of racial abuse. (She was ultimately found not guilty.)
The abuse at ‘The Rape House’ which one victim described to the Mirror does not sound consensual, with the girl telling reporters she felt “felt numb, dead inside” after being forced to have sex with scores of “disgusting” men.
Nevertheless, Home Secretary Amber Rudd MP is steadfastly refusing demands from Telford’s MP and members of the public for an inquiry into the scandal, while Telford police Superintendent Tom Harding has dismissed it as “sensationalised” and claimed: “I don’t believe Telford is any worse than lots of places across England and Wales.”