Shabir Ahmed: Little Horton’s Paedophile Predator

Yesterday’s conviction of 39-year-old Shabir Ahmed of Little Horton, Bradford, for the grooming and sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl, fits into a certain pattern of predatory paedophile behaviour that has unfortunately been witnessed in many towns and cities, particularly in the North of England. The ethnicity and cultural background of the victim was not mentioned in the Telegraph and Argus on 5 May, but following the sentence the paper revealed on the morning of 9 May that she and her sister were actually 'from a respected, traditional, Asian family', rather than from an indigenous background as is usual in such cases. However, use of that term so beloved of the media - 'Asian' - does not meaningfully reveal what sort of background the victims came from. It has been known elsewhere for example, for Muslim paedophile males with origins in the sub-continent to treat Sikh girls with the same sort of abusive contempt that is normally displayed towards English girls in such grooming cases. Whilst it is also known that Ahmed had previous convictions for sex offences involving minors, their background was not mentioned in the reports.

This case comes to a close of course at the same time as the sentencing of eight Pakistanis and one Afghan for a high-profile grooming case in Rochdale. Shocking as this case is, it is unfortunately far from uncommon, and child protection expert Mark Williams Thomas in an interview on BBC News 24 on the evening of 9 May made it clear that this type of crime was specifically a Pakistani and Afghan male one, for 'the overwhelming majority of men' involved in such cases are from these backgrounds. Typically, the victims are white and non-Muslim, as is sadly known to the inhabitants of Blackburn, Burnley, Bradford, Blackpool, Keighley, Rochdale, Rotherham and Derby and other locations.

In this instance Ahmed appears to have acted with one other man who has already pleaded guilty to having sex with the unnamed schoolgirl, but in others Muslim gangs, often based upon family networks, have perpetrated this type of abuse in a systematic and wide-ranging fashion. It is the perceived lack of publicity given to this phenomenon by the mass media, and a sometimes-apparent reluctance by the police and politicians to highlight the religio-cultural specificity of these crimes for fear of endangering what they term 'community cohesion', that has fuelled the anger that has found direct expression in the emergence of the EDL. The official line does not, contrary to the stated intention, preserve 'community cohesion', but rather leads to increased alienation from and mistrust of the legal system, mainstream politicians and the media amongst the sections of the indigenous population whose daughters tend to be targeted for this sort of crime. Any chance of 'community cohesion' is thereby wrecked by a politically correct desire to close their eyes to the reality of this pattern of criminality and to hide it from the public.

Many Muslims, who owing to their innate human decency will be law-abiding individuals who condemn the sort of behaviour displayed by Ahmed and their co-religionist paedophile gangs, will perhaps feel affronted by my drawing attention to the religio-cultural specificity of these crimes, but they should not. They should instead seek to root out and expose those individuals and gangs within their 'communities' who indulge in such behaviours and practices, and to voice categorical condemnation of the example of their prophet Mohammed who married Ayesha at the age of six and consummated their marriage when she was nine years old, for it is precisely this example of their ‘prophet’ that provides ideological, cultural and psychological legitimation to paedophiles from Muslim backgrounds. Moreover, it is also the example of Mohammed that leads these Muslim men to target non-Muslims for sexual exploitation, and to treat them with contempt.

Returning to the specifics of the Ahmed case, the Telegraph and Argus reports that these were not his first offences, for he was a ‘convicted child sex offender’ who was also yesterday sentenced for ‘nine offences of having child pornography on his computer’. In an effort to prevent his most recent crimes from coming to light, he went so far as to threaten ‘to petrol bomb’ the elder sister’s ‘home if she reported what he had done’ and ‘to put sexually explicit film of himself and the schoolgirl on the internet’. He and the co-accused - Munwar Khan - were sentenced on Tuesday 8 May. These men deserve to be locked away for a long time. It would be preferable if they were also to be expelled from the country and stripped of their citizenship, but this will not happen. If there is to be any hope of so-called 'community cohesion' in future, then the onus is upon Muslim 'communities' to vigorously root out, condemn and ostracise the paedophiles in their midsts, just as the rest of society does.  

UPDATE 21 June 2012
It would seem that another Shabir Ahmed has been sentenced, this time at Liverpool Crown Court, for his leading role in the Rochdale-based paedophile gang of Muslim extraction. The series of crimes associated with this gang sparked unrest in the town and led to an EDL protest in Rochdale on 9 June. Additional suspects await trial.

 Shabir Ahmed (courtesy of The Telegraph & Argus)