Today’s report in the Rhyl Journal
CONCERNS had been raised about all three alleged victims in a Rhyl child sexual exploitation trial using drugs and being reported missing, a court heard.
Mustafa Iqbal, Mohamed Arshad, Ziaullah Badshah, Jaswinder Singh and Sarah Gray are on trial at Caernarfon Crown Court in relation to an alleged trafficking conspiracy between 2022 and 2024.
The case involves three teenage female complainants, who were allegedly provided with drugs in exchange for sexual activity.
On Tuesday (June 9), prosecutor Owen Edwards KC read out a statement from a social worker, who stated that there had been escalating concerns regarding Child C’s associations with “risky peer groups” and an involvement with older males from the Rhyl area.
When police spoke to Child A after she’d been reported missing, she refused to say where she had been, or who she had been with.
Child B was also repeatedly reported missing, and was heard to say that she “gets her drugs for free”.
Concerns were also raised that she was spending time with older males, including a man in his 40s.
A friend of Child B’s, known as Child D, was then overheard saying to Singh: “You knew she was a child. The police are going to get you,” after Singh claimed he thought Child B was aged 18.
Mr Edwards also told the jury of the defendants’ previous convictions.
Iqbal has convictions for offences including battery, possession of a bladed article in public, making off without payment, common assault, possessing a prohibited weapon, and breaching a community order.
Arshad was issued with a reprimand for two counts of theft in 2003, while Badshah is of previous good character.
Singh has been convicted of obtaining services by deception, drink-driving, and failing to comply with a community order’s requirements.
The defence case in the trial is expected to start later this week.
A fourth trial of Afghan men accused of raping a young girl started at Crown court Bristol this week. From the Daily Mail
A teenage girl was repeatedly raped by four Afghan nationals after being groomed on Snapchat, lured to a house and plied with vodka and cigarettes, a court has heard.
Mehrab Safi, 21, Awal Ahmadzai and Salman Habibkheil, both 19, and a 16-year-old boy are accused of attacking the 17-year-old girl at the property in Bristol in November last year.
The three men then fled the country in the back of a lorry and were later discovered by French authorities in Calais.
Bristol Crown Court heard how several days before the attack, the girl had been Christmas shopping with a friend in the city’s Cabot Circus shopping centre when they began talking to Safi.
He allegedly groomed the girl on Snapchat and asked her for nude images.
Two days later, in the early hours of November 30, he arranged for a taxi to pick her up from her home in Somerset and take her to an industrial estate in Bristol. Highly ill advised but she believed she was meeting a potential ‘genuine’ boyfriend.
She was met by Safi and Habibkheil and taken to the property, provided with cigarettes and vodka and allegedly raped by Safi and his co-defendants.
Once she arrived, she was taken to a home in St Werburghs and she was very quickly expected to have sex with Mr Safi.
Prosecuting, Ed Hetherington told the jury: ‘She didn’t want to, not yet, but it happened anyway. After Mr Safi had had sex with her, the other three men in the house took it in turns to get her alone in a bedroom or in a bed and to have sex with her against her wishes. . . She was alone. She was isolated in an unfamiliar city miles from home, in the dead of night, with a house full of men she didn’t know. We say she was raped and she was abused repeatedly over a period of several hours.’
Mr Hetherington said the incident ended when the girl’s mother contacted police, with the girl later giving a full account to officers of what she said happened.
Mr Hetherington said CCTV footage showed the girl and Safi holding hands as they walked down the road. ‘There’s no doubt, she thought she was visiting her new boyfriend or potential new boyfriend,’ he told the jury.
Edd Hetherington said the three older co-accused fled the house as the police arrived and in the aftermath travelled to both Birmingham and London.
Mobile phone analysis showed they had also searched for news items in Bristol and for information about sexual activity with a teenage girl.
‘At this point the three defendants are still at large giving the clearest possible indication that they are aware that they have done something very seriously wrong indeed,’ Mr Hetherington said.
Mobile phone footage recovered from Safi’s phone showed the three defendants in the back of the lorry with Habibkheil making hand gestures to the camera and laughing.
‘It is a direct insight into the mood of the three, we suggest, as they travel out of the UK and into France. . . We suggest they are celebrating because they think they have got away with it.’
Safi, of St Werburghs, Bristol, denies one count of human trafficking and two charges of rape.
Habibkheil, of Lockleaze, Bristol, denies one count of human trafficking and one charge of rape.
Ahmadzai, of Redcliffe, Bristol, denies one charge of rape and one of assault by penetration.
The 16-year-old boy also denies one charge of rape.
Their trial, in front of Judge Michael Cullum, is expected to last up to three weeks.
