A ringleader of Rochdale’s infamous sex grooming gang has avoided deportation, tribunal hears. It would be wrong to deport two members of the Rochdale grooming gang who are battling to stay in the UK because a kingpin has evaded deportation, an Immigration Tribunal has ruled.
This is what the gang calls “The Master,” 51-year-old Abdul Aziz. The Home Office informed him that despite losing an appeal to strip him of his British citizenship, the first step before deportation to Pakistan, he would not actually lose his citizenship and was allowed to remain in the United Kingdom.
This Pakistani child rapist has now cost us over £1 million in Legal Aid.
The result: he won't be deported.
We paid Human Rights lawyers £1 million to keep this piece of sh*t in our country.
That's how our taxes are being spent. It just beggars belief.https://t.co/30eB0NAdt4
— English Gardener 🏴 (@Richard_1942) June 28, 2022
Rochdale-based gang members Adil Khan, 51, and Qari Abdul Rauf, 52, were sentenced to prison in 2012 for a slew of child sex offences. Theresa May, the then-home secretary, ruled that deporting all three because they had Pakistani nationality would be “conducive to the public welfare.”
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Because deportation would violate their human rights, they have waged a long legal battle since their release from prison. They have filed several legal challenges and appeals, spanning several years, after their release from prison.
He had already been promised he would not be stripped of his British citizenship and deported as Rauf and Khan maintained their appeal against deportation at an Immigration Tribunal.
After six years in prison, Aziz surrendered his Pakistani citizenship on July 13, 2018, only days before the Court of Appeal ruled that he may lose his British citizenship.
After the Court of Appeal’s decision, Rauf and Khan abandoned their Pakistani citizenship in September of that year.
Although Rauf could reclaim his Pakistani nationality by signing a paper, his lawyers claimed the law requires consistency of treatment, and although if Rauf is legally assisted, he refuses to do so because he does not want to be deported.
“I have a question for the Home Secretary,” Khan said at the hearing, “whether Mr Aziz was an angel and I am a devil?” Khan said.
In 2012, Aziz was sentenced to nine years in prison for conspiring to engage in sexual behaviour with a child through penetrative intercourse and trafficking a 15-year-old girl for sexual exploitation.
For payment to him, he took his victim to Rochdale flats where she was bribed with drugs and alcohol before being forced into sexual relations with a bunch of males.
Rauf’s attorneys also argued that deportation would be a violation of his human rights under the European Convention on Human Rights because of his unique personal and family circumstances.
An previous hearing, Judge Charlotte Welsh allowed an appeal for anonymity for Rauf’s counsel, so that their names would not appear in any reports of the court.
Khan, who was in his 40s at the time, had an affair with a woman and became pregnant, but he refused to acknowledge the child was his until a DNA test was performed. Afterward, he met the second female he sold for sex, and when she resisted, he used violence.
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It was a 15-year-old girl Rauf trafficked, driving her to quiet spots where they had sex in his taxi, and then taking her to a Rochdale apartment where Rauf and other men engaged in sexual activity with her.
The hearing has been postponed until later this year, when a decision on deportation will be made.