Two of Rochdale’s grooming gang members WILL be deported to Pakistan after losing appeal

With Suella Braveman reinstated as Home Secretary today this might actually happen. Just don’t let them back in for family weddings and funerals. From the Manchester Evening News. 

Two members of the Rochdale grooming gang have lost their appeal against deportation from the UK.

Adil Khan, 51, and Abdul Rauf, 52, were among nine gang members jailed in 2012 for a catalogue of child sex offences in Rochdale. Khan, then in his 40s, impregnated one girl, refusing to accept the child was his until a DNA test was done.

He then met the other girl he trafficked to others for sex, using violence when she objected. He was sentenced to eight years in 2012 and released on licence four years later.

Rauf, a father-of-five, trafficked a 15-year-old girl for sex, driving her to secluded areas to have sex with her in his taxi and ferrying her to a flat in Rochdale where he and others had sex with her. He was jailed for six years and released in November 2014 after serving two years and six months of his sentence.

Both men were told they would be sent back to Pakistan following their release from jail. However, both Khan and Rauf fought a long, seven-year legal battle against deportation on the grounds that deportation would interfere with their human rights, mounting multiple legal challenges and appeals.

An Immigration Tribunal hearing was held earlier this year, where both men issued pleas to stay in the UK. However today (October 26), immigration judges ruled against their appeal.

Judges Charlotte Welsh and Judge Siew Ling Yoke, a diversity and community relations judge, released their 31-page legal ruling on Wednesday stating that Khan had shown a “breath-taking lack of remorse” and in his and Rauf’s case there was a “very strong public interest” in their removal.

The decision was made in August and released publicly on Wednesday.

Despite the news that both Khan and Rauf will be deported, their immigration hearing, held in June, heard that one of the gang’s ringleaders, Abdul Aziz, 51, referred to by the gang as The Master, had avoided deportation.

The hearing heard Aziz was told by the Home Office that despite losing an appeal depriving him of UK citizenship, the first step before deportation to Pakistan, he would not in fact lose his citizenship and was allowed to remain in the UK.

Judge Charlotte Welsh granted an application, opposed by the PA news agency and The Sun, for anonymity for the lawyers representing Rauf, who is legally aided, meaning that they should not be named in any report of the hearing.