Pakistan has flatly rejected responsibility for Shabir Ahmed, the convicted ringleader of the Rochdale grooming gang, telling Britain that the 73-year-old offender was raised, ‘groomed’ and ‘spoiled’ in the United Kingdom—and must therefore remain a British problem.
The move came as London intensified efforts to deport Ahmed following his release on licence on 2 July. Born in Pakistan, he moved to Britain at the age of 14 in 1967 and spent almost his entire adult life there. He was jailed in 2012 for 22 years after being convicted of 30 rape and sexual offences against vulnerable girls, some as young as 12, but was released after serving 14 years.
Pakistan Foreign Office spokesman Tahir Andrabi said Ahmed’s crimes were committed on British soil and prosecuted by a British court. ‘Regardless of where he was born, the onus lies on where he grew up,’ he said, adding that Islamabad had ‘no connection whatsoever’ with decisions over Ahmed’s release or supervision.
Ahmed was stripped of his British citizenship after his conviction, but Section 7 of the Immigration Act 1971 protects certain Commonwealth citizens who were settled in Britain before 1973 from deportation. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has announced an amendment allowing that protection to be withdrawn from serious criminals in exceptional cases.
Yet Mahmood acknowledged that changing British law would not guarantee Ahmed’s removal. Pakistan would still have to admit him, which is clearly not the intention of the Muslim country.
The Rochdale gang was part of a wider pattern of grooming gangs across Britain, one of the darkest institutional scandals that has been ongoing for decades. Restore Britain’s Rupert Lowe has recently published a 219-page inquiry into the case, drawing on survivor testimony and earlier investigations to argue that grooming-gang abuse extended across at least 149 local-authority areas and may have affected more than 250,000 victims, although that nationwide estimate remains contested.
The report accused police, social services, and political leaders of repeatedly failing vulnerable girls, arguing that fear of accusations of racism helped suppress scrutiny of networks in which Pakistani-origin men featured prominently in several towns, including Rochdale, Rotherham, and Telford.
Lowe himself responded strongly to Pakistan’s refusal to accept Ahmed. The Restore leader said Islamabad should be designated a ‘rogue state’ and subjected to a complete suspension of Pakistani immigration, trade sanctions and tariffs, taxes on remittances, and the termination of British foreign aid. He argued that the restrictions should remain until Pakistan began accepting substantial numbers of deported criminals from Britain.
‘The response must be swift, ruthless and brutal,’ Lowe wrote, arguing that severe consequences would deter other countries from refusing deportees.
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