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A member of the notorious Rochdale grooming gang fighting deportation from the UK has launched a ‘long rant’ denying his crimes and suggesting his prosecution was racist.
Adil Khan, 51, referred to the “allegations” made against him and called them “a laughing matter” at the immigration court hearing his case.
Khan, along with Qari Abdul Rauf, 52, have been told they should be returned to Pakistan for the public good, after they were both part of a gang convicted of a catalog of serious sex offenses in May 2012.
Since their release from prison, they have fought a long legal battle against the deportation, with numerous legal challenges and appeals, spanning several years on the grounds that the deportation would violate their human rights.
Khan was questioned by government lawyer Rory Dunlop QC over his conviction for conspiracy to have sex with a child and trafficking another girl for sexual exploitation.
Khan, then in his 40s, impregnated a girl, refusing to accept the child as his until a DNA test was carried out.
He then met the other girl whom he trafficked to others for sex, using violence when she objected.
Khan said he only knew 10 words of English so he couldn’t prepare anyone and denied being in the gang.
Khan, speaking through a translator from Miripuri, who said Khan was “going on a long rant”, he said: “I deny it today, and I also denied it then and in the future, never such a thing happen.”
Mr Dunlop said the judge in Khan’s trial had described the suggestion that the prosecution was racially motivated as “nonsense”.
Khan replied; “I understand the racial basis and that’s also the real reason. The Home Office falsely made an allegation against me.
Mr Dunlop said: ‘You treated these 15 year old girls as worthless and undeserving of basic respect and decency because they were not part of your religion or your community, right? ?”
Khan replied, “Religion should not come between anything that I myself have done.”
He told the court he was in a relationship with the 15-year-old girl he became pregnant with, but denied any involvement with the other girl.
And he said his family had accepted he had made a “mistake” and had forgiven him.
He said he did not tell his teenage son about his sentencing and the son did not ask about what he described as “that laughing story”.
Earlier, Judge Charlotte Welsh told the hearing that the court must take into account Khan’s level of integration into British life, both culturally and socially, and his contribution to society.
The failure to evict one of the grooming gangs caused anger in Rochdale, where the victims lived alongside their tormentors, and led to public criticism of a number of house secretaries.
Rauf, a father of five, trafficked a 15-year-old girl for sex, driving her to remote areas to have sex with her in his taxi and transporting her to a flat in Rochdale where he and others had sex with her.
For two years, starting in 2008, a gang of men in Rochdale preyed on girls as young as 12, flooding them with alcohol and drugs before they were gang-raped in rooms above above take-out shops and transported to different apartments in taxis where money was paid to use them.
No less than 47 girls were treated. The appeal hearing against the two men continues.
The hearing was adjourned until Friday morning.
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