Pakistan refusing to take back Rochdale grooming gang leader even after UK sanctions threat

Islamabad, July 17 (AHN) Islamabad is refusing to take back Pakistan-born Shabir Ahmed, the ringleader of a Rochdale grooming gang, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison for 30 child rape offences.

Earlier this week, Yvette Cooper, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs of the UK, signalled that the government is prepared to sanction Pakistan if it refuses to take back the sexual offender. Secretary Cooper said that the UK government would consider using "all possible levers".

While speaking at the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, Cooper noted that the UK government was successful in persuading multiple nations to take back foreign criminals after threatening them with sanctions.

According to some newly-released figures seen in the Daily Mail, Pakistan will receive foreign aid of GBP 155m in the next three years, the Telegraph reported.

Tahir Andrabi, Pakistan’s foreign office spokesman, on Thursday publicly declared that the country's government would not take back ringleader of the Rochdale grooming gang.

Reportedly, Pakistan is refusing to accept Ahmed and has demanded the extradition of two political dissidents from the UK in exchange.

Ahmad served 14 years in prison and was released earlier in July. Despite having been stripped of his UK citizenship, Ahmed cannot be deported to Pakistan due to a 55-year-old loophole in the Immigration Act 1971, which protects people who arrived in the UK before 1973 and lived there for at least five years, the UK-based Independent reported.

He was jailed for 22 years in 2012 and stripped of his UK passport in 2016 to facilitate his deportation when he was released from prison. His victims were promised that he would be deported.

At least 250,000 girls and likely more were subjected to gang rape, trafficking, torture, and coerced pregnancy over several decades, with the perpetrators overwhelmingly being of Pakistani Muslim heritage and the enabling institutions overwhelmingly of the British state, according to a 219-page report released by a privately funded parliamentary inquiry into organised child sexual exploitation in the UK.

–AHN

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