Rochdale grooming: Giving men sex was normal life for girl, trial hears

June 2, 2023

There is a reporting restriction on this trial at Crown Court Minshull Street Manchester but within that the BBC is confident that they can report this part of the prosecution case.

A victim of an alleged grooming gang has told a court how performing sex acts for a series of different men became “just like normal life”.

Manchester’s Minshull Street Crown Court has heard her abuse began when she was aged 12.

A video recording of a police interview given by the girl, referred to as Girl A, in 2015 was played to the jury.

…late at night to meet one of her alleged abusers, Jahn Shahid Ghani, now aged 50, when she was 14. She said they had met for the first time two weeks previously, adding: “I knew it would be sexual. I’d got used to it at that point in life.” She described how he drove her to Syke Moor near Rochdale, where he told her to give him oral sex. “It was just like normal life really, it didn’t faze me”, she said.

She said he then took her to a house where he and a woman she described as “older” gave her ecstasy pills, amphetamines and cannabis as well as vodka after which she said she was “half passed out”. She said Mr Ghani then had sex with her. “I remember it because it was the first time I took drugs”, she said.

She said she had sex with Mr Ghani and the woman a number of times that night, but later noticed how Mr Ghani had been recording it on a camera. She said he had assured her “the tapes would be hidden”.

…she said she and another man had told her to have sex with a woman, aged 19, despite her initial refusals. She said she agreed in order to “to shut them up”, but told the interviewing officer “I later regretted it”. She said the two men were “laughing and having a joke about it”. “There was a tension in the room and I didn’t like it. It felt like I was in a brothel or something”, she said.

She said later the same year she met Mr Ghani for sex with a friend who was 13 at a flat in Oldham, which she said was owned by an older man who Mr Ghani “supplied” with girls. She said they lied to him about their age, saying they were a year older. “We were still under age”, she said.

Mr Ghani denies a series of sexual offences including rape and sexual activity with a child.

The trial continues.