Top - Abdul Qayyum, Hamid Safi, Kabeer Hassan, Wanted - Shazad; Bottom - Abdul Aziz, Mohammed Amin, Adil Khan, Mohammed Sajid.
ILLEGAL immigrant Hamid Safi, of Kensington Street, Rochdale, was found not guilty of two counts of rape but convicted of trafficking and conspiracy.
The 22-year-old, from Afghanistan, hid under a lorry to smuggle himself into Britain after travelling through Turkey and Iran, where he spent six years.
He was captured in Birmingham in November, 2008, but released in March, 2009. He claimed in court he self-harmed while he was in the detention centre to thwart efforts to deport him.
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TAXI driver Mohammed Amin, of Falinge Road, Rochdale, was found guilty of sex assaults and conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with a child.
He was known as Car Zero and drove a Toyota Lucida. He claimed never to have met the girl he sexually assaulted. The girls said he drank beer in his taxi although he claimed in court he was tee-total.
The 45-year-old, who worked at Eagle Taxis, was one of the men who came to the sex parties at the flat at Jepheys Street off Whitworth Street in Rochdale, bringing a bottle of vodka with him and a friend who forced himself on one of the girls.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MARRIED father-of-two Abdul Qayyum, of Ramsay Street, Rochdale, was convicted of conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with a child.
He was regarded as pillar of Rochdale’s Pakistani community, first working as a taxi driver and then setting up his own vehicle recovery business from his home.
Two local councillors even wrote references for the jury, praising his hard work and how he had ‘fully adopted the British way of life’.
His reputation now lies in tatters.
The 44-year-old was known by the girls as Tiger.
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TAXI driver Adil Khan, of Oswald Street, Rochdale, was convicted of trafficking and conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with a child.
He betrayed his wife by starting a sexual relationship with a girl – and just a few weeks after the birth of his first child, a son.
The girl thought the 42-year-old was her boyfriend, telling the jurors he had treated her well.
He had come to Rochdale from Kashmiri Pakistan with his wife in 1997.
Known as Billy by the girls, he went to the sex parties although he claimed only to be playing cards or watching cricket.
He told the court: "They weren’t girls – they were women."
He made the girl pregnant but she had an abortion.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CASH-and-carry worker Mohammed Sajid, of Jephys Street, Rochdale, was found guilty of rape, trafficking and conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with a child.
The married father, 35, abused a string of girls at a flat in Rochdale.
He came to the UK from the same village in Pakistan as co-defendant Abdul Aziz.
Sajid lived with his cousin, wedding photographer Mohammed Shahzad – now on the run from police – in a flat off Whitworth Street that was used for scores of sex parties. Neighbours had noticed the stream of taxis parking up outside the property late into the night.
He had sex with a girl over a two-year period, later claiming thought she was at least 17.
He also raped another girl , creeping into bed while she was sleeping.
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TAXI driver and Muslim preacher Abdul Rauf, of Darley Road, Rochdale, was convicted of trafficking and conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with a child.
Like some of his co-defendants, he opted to ‘affirm’ that he would tell the truth – rather than swear on the Koran in court.
The father-of five worked as a qari, reading the Koran for the congregation at Rochdale's Bilal mosque.
The 42-year-old, who claimed to be a deeply religious, claimed in court he left the post to earn a better wage for his growing family.
In fact, he was sacked by the mosque because of poor time-keeping. Elders denied he had been removed because of allegations he had abused children. In court, he was constantly praying under his breath in the dock, to the annoyance of his co-defendants, one of whom punched him.
He wept when he admitted having sex with a girl in his VW Sharan taxi. It had been a ‘big mistake’ he said, claiming the girl looked ‘maybe 30’. Another girl, the prosecution’s main witness, told the jury she had sex with Rauf 20 or 30 times.
Under cross-examination he appeared to feign a collapse.
Moments earlier, he had warned his inquisitor he had high blood pressure and diabetes and would blame her for any ill-health her questions might bring on. He was taken to hospital but was fit enough to resume the following day.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TAXI driver Abdul Aziz, of Armstrong Hurst Close, Rochdale, was cleared of two counts of rape but convicted of trafficking and conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with a child.
He ferried the girls as far as Leeds and Bradford and was paid by the stream of men who used the girls for sex, getting £40 for each introduction.
Known as Master Aziz or Tariq, the married father-of-three, 41, kept a stash of condoms in his taxi.
He struck up a business relationship with the young girl the Crown said was part of the plot – she would find him new girls and he would take them to the sex parties.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
KABEER Hassan, 25, of Lacrosse Avenue, Oldham, was convicted of rape and conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with a child.
He was the youngest member of the gang and worked at the Balti House – where he raped a girl.
The girl was handed to him as a ‘treat’, according to the prosecution. He had claimed he ‘wouldn’t touch her with a barge-pole’.
In court, Hassan, who also worked at a fruit and veg stall in Oldham, tried to paint himself as a shocked on-looker trying to cope with streams of abusive and drunken teenagers. Some of them, he said, were ‘aggressive and racist’. Some of the girls who visited the shop offered him sex for money, he told the court.
He claimed to have been shocked at the pornographic DVDs other staff put on the upstairs TV for the stream of visiting girls.
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A 59-year-old, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was convicted of two counts of rape, one sex assault, trafficking and conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with a child.
He led the early part of the grooming plot and raped the prosecution’s main witness as she sobbed.
The man told her: "Please don't cry – I love you."
He bought her alcohol and ferried her to sex parties for other men in return for cash, telling her girls could have sex from the age of 11 ‘in my country’.
He admitted a year-long sexual relationship with a girl – the same girl who became part of the grooming plot.
He tried to dismiss the prosecution as ‘white lies’, even launching foul-mouthed tirades against the ‘racist’ judge and jury.
He left one of the jurors in tears after appearing to leer at her.
In court, he dramatically removed his shirt and pulled out a handful of his own chest hair in a bizarre attempt to show the jury that he sheds so much hair he would have left some at the scene of his crime.
Before the case started, he complained that there were no black faces on the jury. Later, he even thumped one of his co-defendants because his constant praying had irritated him.
He claimed the girls were running a successful prostitution racket which would prosper on BBC’s The Apprentice.
He insulted prosecutor Rachel Smith by saying he was her equal ‘without that sheep on your head’.
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