Rochdale grooming gang ringleader’s cushy life revealed..10 years after being released from jail & told he’d be deported
THE ringleader of a grooming gang is living a cushy life 10 years after he was released from prison and told he would be deported.
Qari Abdul Rauf, now 55, remains in the same town where he formed a nine-strong gang of Asian men convicted of sex offences in 2012.
The heinous gang plied up to 47 girls as young as 12 with alcohol and drugs before they were gang-raped across Rochdale.
Rauf was jailed for six years in 2012, but was released in November 2014 after serving two years and six months of his sentence.
He was told by then-Home Secretary Theresa May that he would be deported to Pakistan as it would be “conducive to the public good”.
But more than a decade after his release from prison, Rauf remains in Rochdale.
He is understood to work for a takeaway delivery app and walks around “like he owns the place”, MailOnline reports.
Neighbours told told the publication his presence in the town is “disgusting”.
One mum said: “Nobody can believe that monster is still here, after what he did to those young girls.
“It’s disgusting. What is the country coming to? Why is he still here?
“He was living in that house when he was offending, my kids used to go around and play with his kids.”
Other neighbours shared their fury at how Rauf has been able to stay in the UK.
Another said “nobody wants him around here”.
Rauf was last year living in a three-bedroom semi-detached home.
He lost a lengthy deportation battle in 2018, but subsequently launched another case.
Rauf insisted the deportation order lodged against him was in breach of his human rights as he had a wife and children in the UK.
His appeal was rejected, but he remains in the country.
Rauf also renounced his Pakistani citizenship, making him “stateless” – a bar to deportation.
It comes a day after Sir Keir Starmer brushed off increasing calls for a national inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal.
He slammed Elon Musk for “spreading lies and misinformation” during a press conference on Monday.
Defending his record, the PM said: “Let me start with this: Child sexual exploitation is utterly sickening. Utterly sickening. And for many, many years too many victims have been completely let down.
“Let down by perverse ideas about community relations or by the idea that institutions must be protected above all else and they have not been listened to and they have not been heard.
“And when I was chief prosecutor for five years I tackled that head on because I could see what was happening and that is why I reopened cases that had been closed and supposedly finished, I brought the first major prosecution of an Asian grooming gang in the particular case it was in Rochdale but it was the first of its kind, there were many that then followed that format.
“We changed, or I changed, the whole prosecution approach because I wanted to challenge and did challenge the myths and stereotypes that were stopping those victims being heard.”
The PM also rejected calls for a statutory inquiry into the grooming gangs, insisting the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) led by Professor Alexis Jay was “comprehensive”.
Why has Tommy Robinson been jailed?
By Ryan Merrifield
Tommy Robinson was jailed for 18 months in October after showing a film containing slurs about a Syrian refugee.
The 41-year-old, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, appeared at Woolwich Crown Court after breaching a 2021 High Court order barring him from repeating false claims about a then-schoolboy.
Far-right activist Robinson was accused of being in contempt of court over having “published, caused, authorised or procured” a film titled Silenced, which contained the libellous allegations.
Contempt of court is a legal term that describes behaviour that interferes with the justice process or risks unfairly influencing a court case, according to Gov.uk.
The Solicitor General said he “knowingly” breached the order on four occasions.
Robinson breached a 2021 High Court order barring him from repeating false claims about then-schoolboy Jamal Hijazi, who successfully sued him for libel.
The Solicitor General issued the first contempt claim against Robinson in June 2024, claiming he “knowingly” breached the order on four occasions.
In court last year, Robinson admitted the charges.
Lawyers previously told a judge that the breaches included Robinson having “published, caused, authorised or procured” a film titled Silenced, which contained the libellous allegations, in May 2023.
The second claim was issued in August, concerning six further breaches, including playing the film to a demonstration in Trafalgar Square in central London earlier this year, which lawyers for the Solicitor General told an earlier hearing was a “flagrant” breach of the court order.
Aidan Eardley KC, for the Solicitor General, said the film was viewed “very extensively”, including being seen by 2.2 million people after being reposted by Andrew Tate.
And, he said in written submissions that by the time the second claim was issued, it “had received 44m views on X alone”.
He claimed that all of the paragraphs of the injunction were breached “at one point or another” by the film.
The sentence for contempt of court can be up to two years imprisonment at the Crown Court or one month at the magistrates’ court.
Silenced is a film which contains the false and libellous allegations about Mr Hijazi which Robinson was banned from repeating.
Sasha Wass KC, for Robinson, told the court that the film’s production was funded by Infowars, a company run by American Alex Jones, who has claimed that the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre was a hoax.
The activist played the film to a demonstration in Trafalgar Square in central London.
It also remains pinned to the top of Robinson’s profile on social media site X, while he also repeated the claims in three interviews between February and June 2023.