The victim of a Telford grooming gang has said she is ‘happy and sad’ at seeing her paedophile abusers behind bars – 17 years after her horrific deal began.
The group forced their victim to perform sex acts in a churchyard, raped her above a shop on a filthy mattress, and violently abused her when she tried to refuse their advances, a court heard.
Last week four of the men were jailed for more than 22 years after sexually abusing the girl, between 2000 and 2003, when she was just 12-years-old at the time.
The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, who bravely testified in the trial against the men, told The Sunday Mirror: ‘I just sobbed. I was relieved, happy and sad, all at the same time.’
The victim said the abuse started when she was 12 but lasted until her mid-teens after she was befriended by a man named Tanveer Ahmed.
Pictured L-R: Mohammed Ali Sultan, Nazam Akhtar, Amjad Hussain, Mohammad Rizwan and Shafiq Younas
Shafiq Younas, 35 (left) was convicted of indecent assault and was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison. Amjad Hussain (right) who was found guilty of a single count of indecent assault but cleared of a similar offence, was jailed for four-and-a-half years
She said she was traded between men and forced to perform sex acts in a churchyard and raped above a takeaway shop on a dirty mattress in Telford, Shropshire.
Mohammed Ali Sultan, 33, formerly of Telford, was convicted of rape and three counts of indecent assault at Birmingham Crown Court.
Mohammad Rizwan, 37, of Telford, was found guilty of two counts of indecent assault and caged for five-and-a-half years.
Shafiq Younas, 35 of Wellington, Shrops., was convicted of indecent assault and was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison.
Amjad Hussain, 38, of Telford, who was found guilty of a single count of indecent assault but cleared of a similar offence, was jailed for four-and-a-half years.
Mohammed Ali Sultan, 33, formerly of Telford, was convicted of rape and three counts of indecent assault. Mohammad Rizwan, 37, of Telford, was found guilty of two counts of indecent assault and caged for five-and-a-half years
A fifth defendant, Nazam Akhtar, 35, of Wellington, was cleared of rape.
The victim, who is now an adult, added: ”My case proves you can get justice, after all these years. You’ve already survived so much and you’re stronger than you think. I’d like to thank everybody who supported me through this process.
‘I’m not going to pretend it was easy. But I did it to make the streets safer for my own children. There hasn’t been a day where I haven’t thought about what happened to me. I hope I can now have some peace in my life and move on.’
Jurors were told that the vulnerable victim was sold for sex, first by a man named Tanveer Ahmed, who had ‘befriended her’ during a low point in her life.
Ahmed, who did takeaway deliveries at Perfect Pizza in the town, was not on trial alongside the other defendants, having been deported to Pakistan for ‘unrelated offences’, the court heard.
The woman told Birmingham Crown Court how she was abused and raped by countless men when she was a child
Jurors did not hear how Ahmed, then 40 and formerly of Urban Gardens, in Wellington, was jailed for two-and-a-half years after admitting a charge of controlling a child prostitute as part of a series of court cases that ended in 2013.
He was one of seven men jailed after an investigation into a child prostitution ring in Telford, as part of West Mercia Police’s Operation Chalice inquiry.
During the trial, jurors watched video-recorded interviews with the victim, in which she told detectives of enduring two years of ‘hell’ and of repeatedly contemplating taking her own life as she was traded to different men for ‘months and months’.
She claimed to have been taken to a flat above the Perfect Pizza shop ‘to have sex with Asians’, and ‘lost count’ of the number of men at whose hands she suffered abuse.
The woman said her family knew nothing at the time but added that ‘people at school’ somehow found out, through rumour.
‘I used to get called p***-s*****r,’ she said.
‘There used to be like actions, with their hand, hand by their mouth, suggesting b*****s.’
Speaking after her ordeal, the victim said: ‘They asked me, ‘Have you been involved?’ I broke down. That was my secret. But I thought, ‘I want to do it for other girls going through this, suffering every day like I did’.
‘I know this happened to other girls and I’d urge them to speak to the police. When I was younger, I didn’t think people would believe me. But they did and I got justice.
‘When I found out they’d been found guilty, I just sobbed. I was relieved, happy and sad, all at the same time.’