Rotherham trial: Woman ‘told she would be kneecapped if spoke out about abuse brothers’

This week’s news reporting of the continuing trial at Crown Court Sheffield. From the Star and the Rotherham Advertiser 

ONE of the ten female complainants in the child sex abuse trial claims she was threatened with a gun by an associate of the Hussain brothers and told not to speak to the police. She said in her police interview in March 2015 that was shown to the jury today: “He pulled me into a car, put a gun in my mouth and said ‘police have contacted you haven’t they about Ash, Bash and Bono? Open your mouth and this is what you get’.

The woman said the abuse started when the brothers barged their way into her rented family home, which they claimed their uncle owned, and knew her mother was an alcoholic. She said Arshid, who she believed was in his 20s, said: “I own this, Rotherham’s mine, don’t you get it”. . . he had called her a ‘white bitch’ and ‘white trash’.

The woman said he then forced her to perform oral sex, and in the evening Basharat visited and had sex with her but used a condom so he would not ‘give any diseases to his wife’.

She added: “They owned Masbrough, they owned every house going.”

“I have been threatened to do my kneecaps in. My life was in jeopardy. My life wouldn’t have been worth living. They were threatening me, my mum, my family.”

She said she did eventually decide to speak to the police. “No one would have believed us years ago. Today is my time to tell my story,”

The woman described how low her confidence was today due to the alleged abuse and said she did not trust going to the police to report it at the time it was happening. She alleged police officers had been passing information to the brothers.

She added: “I have no confidence, I get undressed in the dark sometimes, I hate myself, I actually hate myself. Not just because of what they have done.

“How could I go to a police officer when they are just more involved with it, with them? The police basically gave them a free card to do what they wanted. How could us women go to police officers and tell them these things when they are going straight back to tell them? You couldn’t.”

The woman has previously told the court Arshid and Basharat Hussain, who are among seven defendants on trial for playing roles in a Rotherham child sexual exploitation ring, took her to Sheffield with her sister to be sold for sex to men.

“They used to take us up Sheffield when we would go working on the beat. It was not just me and my sister, there were quite a lot of us.” She said the men would be paid and she would be given a small amount.

Mr Khan suggested that his client did not know the woman and she had been working as a prostitute on her own initiative to fund a £200-a-week heroin habit she had as a teenager.