Islamabad, July 5 (IANS) The Pakistani government is maintaining the same claim as the ringleader of the grooming gang in the UK’s Rochdale by saying he is no longer a Pakistani citizen, a media report said.

“Pakistan is refusing to take back a ringleader of the Rochdale grooming gang on the grounds that he is no longer a citizen of the country after ripping up his passport. Shabir Ahmed, who was freed this week after serving 14 years in prison for 30 child rape offences, claims that he renounced his Pakistani citizenship, The Telegraph reported.

Britain is disputing the claims of the grooming gang leader, but Pakistani officials and ministers are saying that he is no longer a Pakistani citizen, which stops the return of the offender to the country of his birth.

“Pakistan’s refusal to take Ahmed back is seen within the UK Government as a bigger hurdle to his deportation than closing a loophole in the 1971 Immigration Act that bars his removal from the UK as a Commonwealth Citizen,” noted the report.

“There is probably a way of solving the problem over the 1971 Immigration Act. That is more solvable than the Pakistan side of the equation,” a government source said, as reported by The Telegraph.

Ahmed left Pakistan in the late 1960s and had dual citizenship. He was jailed for 22 years in 2012 and stripped of his UK passport in 2016 to facilitate his deportation when he was released from prison. His victims were promised that he would be deported.

At least 250,000 girls and likely more were subjected to gang rape, trafficking, torture, and coerced pregnancy over several decades, with the perpetrators overwhelmingly being of Pakistani Muslim heritage and the enabling institutions overwhelmingly of the British state, according to a 219-page report released by a privately funded parliamentary inquiry into organised child sexual exploitation in the UK.

The Rape Gang Inquiry, chaired by Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe and led operationally by survivor and advocate Sammy Woodhouse, was funded by over 20,000 donors. It did not have statutory powers; however, it included testimony from survivors, whistleblowers, politicians, and experts across multiple public hearings, according to a report on a US-based South Asian TV network, Diya TV.

–IANS

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