Four men on trial in Plymouth accused of rape and sexual assaults on teenage girls

From the Plymouth Herald

A jury heard how a Plymouth girl plucked up the courage to call police about abuse she claimed to have suffered after she watched the BBC drama Three Girls which dramatised the 2012 grooming and sex trafficking case in Rochdale.

Prosecutor Dan Pawson-Pounds spent a number of hours summarising the case at Plymouth Crown Court against Anthony Anantharajah, Moussa Ahmadou, Abalzaq Salih and Saif Kahya. He noted that the arrests and charges came about following a long-running investigation by Devon and Cornwall Police officers, which dated back to incidents alleged to have taken place from 2016 onwards.

He said the charges come from four separate events in Plymouth which took place between January 2016 and December 2017 whereby the four men arranged for parties at different addresses in the city where they plied the underage teenage girls with alcohol and drugs before sexually assaulting and raping them.

Abalzaq Salih, aged 30, and from Harwell Court, Plymouth is charged with two counts of rape – the first being anal rape of a girl aged under 16, in May 2017 and the second being a charge of vaginal rape alleged to have taken place in December 2017 on a different girl aged under 16.

Saif Kahya, aged 31 and from Mabely View, Liverpool, faces one count of vaginal rape of a girl in December 2017.

Anthony Anantharajah, formerly of Connaught Avenue, Mutley, is charged with charged with one count of non-penetrative sexual activity with a girl aged under 16 between January and May 2016 and one count of rape on another female in February 2017 on another female under .

Moussa Ahmadou, aged 43 and from Plymouth is charged with one count of sexual assault on a female sometime in May 2017. None of the girls can be identified due to legal restrictions

The jury were warned the trial will take an estimated six weeks and they would hear from a large number of witnesses, including others who attended some of the ‘parties’ where the girls alleged they were sexually assaulted.

The trial continues.