GMP identify 809 members of child sex grooming gangs as new unit is launched

Come on, Reclaim the Streets, now is your chance to stand up and agitate for seriously abused proletarian girls. From the Manchester Evening News

A new police unit to investigate child sex grooming gangs in Greater Manchester has already identified more than 800 offenders.

It is running three major investigations into historic abuse of young girls in Manchester and Rochdale. GMP’s Force Child Sexual Exploitation Unit, has 54 officers and staff and has been launched at a cost of £2.3m.

A year in the planning It comes in the wake of stinging criticism of the force for previous failings when investigating such crimes.

Across the force there are now 70 investigations which involve multiple victims of child sexual exploitation. A total of 468 victims have been discovered of whom 332 have been identified. Police say there are 809 offenders of whom 540 are known.

The new unit will focus on large and complicated investigations and is currently handling three major operations. One, Operation Exmoor, has identified ten new victims in Rochdale aged nine to 16 who were sexually abused between 2008 and and 2013. A wide range of alleged offences committed against them includes rape and sexual assault. It was begun after a review of Operation Span, an investigation into an infamous child sex grooming gang led by Shabir Ahmed, known as “Daddy”.

A second investigation which the new CSE Unit is handling is Operation Green Jacket. It was launched in May 2019 as a response to the flawed Operation Augusta. After the death of Victoria Agoglia, aged 15, in 2003, Augusta, was set up to see if there was a wider issue of child sexual exploitation in south Manchester. Victoria was sexually abused and injected with heroin.

Officers managed to identify a network of nearly 100 men potentially involved in the abuse of scores of girls via takeaways in and around Rusholme, but Augusta was shut down shortly afterwards due to resources, ‘rather than a sound understanding’ of whether lines of inquiry had been exhausted. Resources? Or an order given in the days after the London Transport bombings of 7th July 2005. The last entry on the August datatbase was the evening of 6th July – the entire operation was closed within weeks. Maggie Oliver doesn’t think this was co-incidence and neither do I. 

Hardly any charges were made against the men identified by the operation. Eight of them later went on to commit serious sexual crimes, including the rape of a child, the rape of a young woman, sexual assault and sexual activity with a child.

In addition to investigating large scale and complex cases, the unit will also have strategic oversight of all multi-victim/multi-suspect CSE investigations taking place across Greater Manchester.

Perhaps Reclaim the Streets would like to put pressure on the Greater manchester Police to actually see these initiatives, of which there have been a few over the last 2-3 years actually do achieve some convictions. And then, the defendants having served a decent length, if eligible for and ordered to be deported they really are ejected. Asda isn’t quite what the Judge had in mind when he ordered the deportation of  Abdul Rauf, Abdul Aziz and Adil Khan back to Pakistan.