Islam versus Europe

It's interesting that the Times describes the perpetrators as "Muslim" men in its headline. Normally it uses the euphemism "Asian". Perhaps they were stung by the Muslim rapists accusing the Times of racism?

A man convicted with four others yesterday for his role in subjecting two girls to a weekend of degrading sexual attacks told The Times that their young victims “enjoyed it”.

Shamrez Rashid, 20, found guilty of child abduction, two rapes, attempted rape and attempted sexual assault, said that he and his friends were celebrating a Muslim religious festival when they had repeated sex with the girls who were aged 15 and 16. “It was Eid. We treated them as our guests. OK, so they gave us [oral sex] but we were buying them food and drink. They could have anything they wanted. They enjoyed it,” he said.

Rashid and Amar Hussain, 21, lured the girls from their home town of Telford, Shropshire, to a flat in Birmingham where they gave them alcohol and used them for sex before “offering them up to their friends”, the jury was told. Their trial at Birmingham Crown Court was the latest in which groups of men have been accused of sexually exploiting vulnerable, adolescent girls.

Alex Chalk, prosecuting, said the men viewed the girls as worthless, “believed they could do with them as they pleased” and used their strength in numbers to convince the teenagers “that resistance or escape was hopeless”.

The 16-year-old initially met Rashid, who used the nickname Adam, at a theme park in the Midlands and they became “friends” on Facebook. Months later, in November 2009, he phoned and persuaded her to meet him in Telford. He arrived in a car with Hussain and invited the two girls to travel with them to Birmingham, where they were taken to a two-room flat with a kitchen, which had a mattress on the floor, and a bedroom.

A series of sexual attacks took place that Saturday night and the following night, when the girls were taken to a Birmingham hotel.

The 16-year-old said that when one of the men lifted her off the bed and tried to take her to the kitchen she “grabbed onto the frame of the door” in a vain attempt to prevent the rape that followed.

Throughout the weekend, she said she felt “dirty, embarrassed and sick, like I wasn’t worth anything”. She wept as she described reading text messages sent to her during the weekend by family members, asking where she was and saying that they missed her.

“They were eight of them in the flat and they kept jumping on us. I didn’t want to do anything with any of them. I was upset because I couldn’t get back. I thought my Mum was going to be angry.”

Rashid did not give evidence but Mohammed Latif, defending him, suggested that all the sex between Rashid and the 16-year-old was consensual and that at times the girls were seen laughing and joking. They were “streetwise young ladies”, he said, and there were many occasions during the weekend when they could have raised the alarm, but chose not to.

During the trial, Rashid told The Times that he and his friends had done nothing wrong and that by reporting the case and similar sex-grooming trials the newspaper was guilty of racism.

“It was only two of us the first night. Okay, there were three or four more the second night but we paid £90 for two hotel rooms. We treated them well.”

Hussain was found guilty of child abduction and three rapes, Amer Islam Choudhrey, 20, of child abduction and sexual assault, Jahbar Rafiq, 28, of rape and sexual assault and Adil Saleem, 20, of rape. Aqueel Rahman, 20, was found not guilty of sexual assault. Rashid, Hussain, Choudhrey, Rafiq and Saleem will be sentenced on April 20.

Source: The Times (£)