From the Manchester Evening News; Day Two of the latest Rochdale grooming gang trial.
Recordings of video interviews ‘Girl C’ gave to police in 2016 were played to a jury on Tuesday in the ongoing trial of six men from the town at Manchester’s Minshull Street Crown Court. They all deny the charges they face.
One alleged victim, referred to as Girl C, said in her police interviews years later that she would run away from home aged 13 and 14 – and told of her friendship with Girl A, also an alleged victim. In her interview, the woman told how they started ‘hanging out’ with older Asian men at a snooker hall in Rochdale.
“I was about 13 when I started going out to meet them,” she said, adding they were aged in their early 20s. “We used to meet lads on the street and they would take us to their house.
Prosecutors allege Tahir Rashid, 54, gave his victim vodka then raped her in a bedroom of his home on a number of occasions. The court was told he was known as ‘Taz’.
The woman told police of a man she called ‘Taz’ and of another she called ‘Wolfman’. “I met Taz first,” she said. “I remember [Girl A] knew him. She introduced me to him. We used to go to his house. A few times that Wolfman used to be there.” She said she was around 14 at the time. ” . . . We used to go there and have sex with him. I do not remember anything else. I do remember that we had sex with him.”
She said he was an Asian man.
“He knew how old I was,” she told police. “I never said I was older.”
The woman said the man had sex with Girl A separately. “I never used to say no to people, so it was easy for him to get what he wanted,”
She said the (other) man was called ‘Sucky’. “I saw Sucky as we were going out with each other,” she said. “Obviously we wasn’t. I just used to meet him. He used to have a house. I think we just used to meet and have sex in his car. I never went inside his house. I thought that we were going out with each other.”
She said he was in his 30s and she was 14 at the time. “He probably just tried it, and I did it,” she said. “He knew my age and my name and stuff like that.”
She said she would have told him her real age and that he would pick her up when she was wearing her school uniform. And she told police that he told her he was married with children.
The Crown say Girl C and her friend, Girl A, were vulnerable teenage schoolgirls who were ‘easy prey’ for the men, who allegedly passed them around for sex and abused them ‘in the most humiliating and degrading way imaginable’.
Tahir Rashid, Mohammed Saleem, 46, Sucklane Shah, 46, Amjad Mahmood, 53, Itfaq Hussain, 45, and Arshad Mohammed, 55, all deny the offences they are accused of.
