Primark security guard convicted of raping and sexually assaulting teenage shoplifters

Update – The Daily Mail has his Metropolitan Police photograph. Rape jihad in London is fragmented and doesn’t produce, or not yet, the mass trials. This is not quite your usual grooming gang – this specimen seems to have worked alone but like the more familiar gangs he too preyed on girls on the fringes and vulnerable. 

From the Telegraph and the London Evening Standard

A Primark security guard raped and sexually assaulted teenage girls whom he pressured into performing indecent acts after they were caught shoplifting, a court has heard.

Zia Uddin, 27, threatened to call the police and parents of four 15-year-old girls while working in the Kingston upon Thames branch of the fashion retailer in 2017, the Crown Prosecution Service said. He coerced the victims into performing a string of lewd acts in the control room of the shop in exchange for his silence – after making clear it was the only way they could leave. 

His predatory behaviour was eventually stopped when police received a complaint from someone close to one of the victims. 

Uddin was employed by Brooknight Security and had worked in Primark’s Stratford store before being transferred to the revamped Kingston branch. That shop is very close to the Stratford branch of McDonalds which was subject to police attention after a group of under age girls reported being raped by men who groomed them in the resturant in 2017. Only last month a schoolboy who took an unexpected detour for a quick snack on his way home from school when his usual train was cancelled due to the action of Extinction Rebellion blockading the Docklands Light Railway was murdered; stabbed in his school uniform at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. There is a case to shut it down. 

The guard … was found guilty of rape and four counts of causing or inciting a child to engage in sexual activity following a trial at Kingston Crown Court, the CPS said.  

Jurors were told how Uddin’s colleagues became suspicious of his strange behaviour, including his requests for CCTV to be deleted and failure to fill out the paperwork for shoplifting reports.  The defendant was also known to keep condoms in the control room, the CPS said. He was said to have been “well aware” of the branch’s CCTV blind spots and exploited this to carry out his offending.

Graham Partridge, from the CPS, said: “Zia Uddin preyed on young girls in a vulnerable situation. He abused his authority by telling them to perform sexual acts for him on the promise they would then be released without their parents or the police being informed about what they had done. The prosecution case was able to rely on strong witness testimony from the victims who were able to give evidence via pre-recorded video after the CPS applied for special measures.”

Uddin, of Manor Park, Newham, was found to have made phone calls to other girls accused of shoplifting after making a note of their numbers after they were caught .

Victims would desperately offer for the items they had been caught stealing or even work in the shop to compensate for their actions, his trial heard. It was only when they reached the back office, alone, that they realised Uddin was only interested in one thing from them – lurid acts. 

Mr Partridge said: “During the trial Uddin claimed all the victims were liars and refused to take responsibility for his actions…”

Uddin will be sentenced on November 19 at Kingston Crown Court.