Oxford Child Sex Abuse Case: Prosecution Presents ‘Uncomfortable’ Details In Court
A court in the UK Tuesday heard the details of the sufferings of six girls from Oxford who were sexually abused and tortured by a gang of nine men.
The story of the girls, who were drugged and used for sex trade, was narrated in the Old Bailey court in London during the trial of the nine accused men. The men were accused of child sex, racketeering, rape and torture.
According to the details divulged in the court, the men -- seven Pakistanis and two North Africans -- allegedly forced the children, who were as young as 10 years at the time of crime, to drink alcohol and take drugs. They had tortured the girls with "little or no human decency," the Daily Mail reported.
The prosecution described the details of the crime as “extremely shocking and horrific,” stating that the accused had inflicted inhuman torture on the girls and raped them several times in the span of eight years between 2004 and 2012.
The nine men allegedly befriended the young girls who either had a troubled upbringing or had lived in care homes. The men initially showered the girls with love and attention which they had seldom received at their homes. The girls were later given alcohol and drugs like cannabis, cocaine and heroin.
“The girls who were chosen generally had troubled upbringings and unsettled home lives. The combination made it less likely that anyone would be exercising any normal parental control over them or indeed keep a careful eye out for them,” Prosecutor Noel Lucas QC said.
The girls were subjected to brutal torture to make them comply with the barbaric demands of the abusers. They were tied, beaten, urinated upon and suffocated till they agreed to the demands of the gang, according to the prosecutor.
"The depravity, and I use that word with care, of what was done to the complainants was extreme… The facts in this case will make you feel uncomfortable," Lucas QC told the jurors, according to a BBC report.
A girl, who was aged 12 years when she fell into the trap of the gang, said in her testimony that the men had threatened to burn her little brother alive if she failed to obey their demands. She was raped, drugged and presented to several men in different properties in and around London. The torture was so extreme that the girl started inflicting self-harm to “escape the pain,” the court heard.
The girls hardly had any chance to resist or disobey the gang as they were so enslaved mentally and physically that they lost the sense of what had been happening to them, the prosecution said.
The prosecution, referring to the girl’s testimony, said: “She saw other drugged and emaciated girls in the houses, sometimes just lying on a bed with their legs drawn up and completely out of it, waiting for the next round of drink and drugs" the PA reported.
The girls were reportedly subjected to “degrading levels of sexual abuse.” The men allegedly used baseball bats, knives and blunt objects on the girls to inflict internal injuries.
The girls who had got pregnant by the attackers were subjected to the primitive methods of abortion. The gang leader allegedly used an instrument to abort the pregnancy in an 11-year-old girl.
The alleged torture took place in private houses, hotels and guest houses in London, Bradford, Leeds and Bournemouth.
The accused -- Kamar Jamil, Akhtar Dogar, Anjum Dogar, Assad Hussain, Mohammed Karrar, Bassam Karrar, Mohammed Hussain, Zeeshan Ahmed and Bilal Ahmed (all aged between 24 and 28 years) -- pleaded not guilty of the charges.
In May last year, a Liverpool court sentenced a gang of nine men from Rochdale to a total of 77 years in jail for using young girls for sex trade.
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