Schoolgirl ‘who was sold for sex by Asian grooming gang’ says teachers failed to step in when she endured vile playground insults over abuse, court hears

First day of evidence in this trial. Five Muslim men from Telford, on trial for rape and other sexual offences against a young girl from the age of 12. 

A woman who was ‘traded between men and raped’ as a girl today told a court that ‘not one teacher’ intervened when she was bullied over the abuse at school.

The victim claimed she was forced to perform sex acts in a churchyard, raped above a takeaway shop on a dirty mattress, and violently abused when she tried to refuse the men’s advances.

On one occasion she said she was urinated on by one of five men, all of whom are on trial at Birmingham Crown Court.

Jurors watched a video-recorded interview with the victim, in which she told detectives of enduring two years of ‘hell’ and repeatedly contemplated taking her own life as she was traded between different men for ‘months and months’. 

She said her family knew nothing at the time but added that ‘people at school’ somehow found out, through rumour.

She said: ‘I don’t know how people found out, but they did. I wouldn’t say I was bullied for it, but I would get called names. It just made me keep it to myself even more. ‘There used to be like actions, with their hand, hand by their mouth, suggesting b******s.

‘Even the teachers heard people saying these things and not one teacher pulled me to the side and asked me if things were all right. I was too scared to go and ask for help. But nobody said a word.’

She told police that, years after the abuse ended, she recognised photos of two alleged attackers, Ali Sultan and Ahmed, from press reports on the ‘Telford sex ring’, during the Operation Chalice investigation.

Asked why she did not tell anyone about exactly happened until years later, she replied: ‘I think I had just had enough, I kept it to myself for all these years. Why should somebody be able to do those things and get away with it? Still to this day it goes through my head, all the time.’

She also told how, at the time, her mother ‘went berserk’ at her, after a neighbour had told her, ‘Pakistani [men] were coming to the house when she wasn’t there’.

Barrister Anthony Barraclough, representing Ali Sultan, asked the woman – giving evidence in court from behind a screen – if she had ‘lied’ about one of the alleged rapes, after telling the jury there was evidence that his client was in Pakistan at the time.

She replied: ‘I know what he did.’

Mr Barraclough then asked why she told a ‘lie to police’, by changing an account she gave at the time.

She said: ‘I told them that I had been raped, then I told them I hadn’t because I was too scared to tell them.’

Earlier, she claimed to have been threatened by Ali Sultan as a child never to speak of her alleged abuse.

It was only years later that she finally spoke about what happened, when police knocked her door. ‘I was being raped and abused and assaulted,’ she said.

Asked by Mr Barrclough if she had made accusations against Ali Sultan because Ahmed was now abroad, beyond the reach of English courts, the woman replied: ‘It’s not about getting my own back. It’s about getting justice. He shouldn’t be able to walk around.’

The men deny any wrongdoing and the trial continues.