News Beat
Bury and Radcliffe cousins groomed and abused girls
Manzorr Hussain, now 54, and Imtiaz Ali, now, 53, were both in their 20s when they raped and abused the “often vulnerable” teenage girls in Bury and elsewhere across the region.
But Minshull Street Crown Court heard a third man, Hussain’s cousin Ghulum, has since fled the country and is yet to face justice.
The court listened on silence as one of the men’s victims spoke from behind a screen to lay bare the effects the men had had on her.
She said: “No one protected us, no one rescued us.”
She added: “When your body is the scene of the crime there is no getting away from it, there is no escaping it.”
The now grown woman set out how the men had abused and raped her and her fellow victims repeatedly in the late 1990s.
She said: “I’m the girl who was drugged, raped and passed around for others gratification, perversion and money to be gained.”
The victim said the men were “paedophiles, rapists, the scum of the earth, the lowest of the low.”
Prosecutor Anna Pope said: “A number of the girls were particularly vulnerable.
“They had troubled backgrounds. These defendants took advantage of their personal situations and provided them with drink, drugs, lifts, a place to spend time and company.
“This was all part of the grooming process.
“The girls were made to feel like they owed something to these men in return.
“The sexual activity which then took place was not with their true consent.”
Hussain and Ali watched on in silence from the dock as Ms Pope laid bare the abuse they carried out against the girls between 1996 and 2000.
The sex abuse took place at houses, in flats, in takeaways, a hotel and sometimes in a car or a van.
Ms Pope read out a statement from another of the men’s victims who said she had “lost her childhood” and “took away my ability to feel loved and safe”.
But she said she helped the police with their investigation because it was “the right thing to do”.
After the abuse ended around 2000, each of the men lived on undetected for years until one of their victims came forward in 2019.
This, in turn, led the police to the other victims, and the sheer scale of the men’s sex crimes became clear.
Hussain and Ali were arrested, and each answered no comment in interview, denying their crimes when they were brought to trial.
But a jury convicted Hussain, of Manchester Road, Redvales of six indecent assaults, five rapes, two counts of aiding an abeting rape and one count of attempted indecent assault.
Ali, of Ainsworth Road, Radcliffe, was convicted of five rapes, five indecent assault and one attempted indecent assault.
Rachel Shenton, defending Hussain, said he still did not accept his guilty but reminded the court that the now 54-year-old grandfather was in his 20s at the time.
She said he had managed to stay out of trouble for 20 years.
Clare Ashcroft, for Ali, said that after a previous spell in prison on unrelated offences he too had stayed out of trouble.
She asked for some “glimmer of light” to be allowed after he had finished what looked set to be a long sentence.
But Judge Bernadette Baxter reminded the court of the sheer devastation that the men had wrought.
She said that in what proved to be a grimly familiar pattern the cousins had befriended and then groomed the girls before beginning “a campaign of rape”.
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Judge Baxter noted how many of the girls had come from troubled backgrounds and had in some cases “bonded” over their difficult home lives.
She said that Hussain and Ali had used drugs and alcohol, followed by threats to keep their victims under control.
Judge Baxter said it was clear from the moving statements provided by two of the girls how the cousins had devastated their sense of confidence, self worth and mental health.
She jailed Hussain for 30 years and Imtiaz for 28 years, ordering that each will serve at least two-thirds in prison and made them subject to indefinite notification requirements.
Before the men went down in silence, Hussain appeared to briefly wave to supporters in the public gallery.
