Highfield House is a large Victorian mansion on the edge of a nature reserve half a mile uphill from the centre of Accrington in Lancashire.
Built for the family of a wealthy mill owner, the sprawling property has been repurposed by the Government as an ‘approved premises’ to house male criminals deemed ‘higher risk’ on their release from prison.
In practice, that makes it a sort of half-way house for some of the North-West’s most notorious sex offenders.
Recent residents include Ashley Barratt, a noted paedophile who boasts 70 convictions including 25 for child sexual abuse material offences, and Peter Swann, a sex offender who was in 2022 described as ‘the world’s worst fraudster’ after being jailed over a plot to steal sandwiches worth £760.
It has also been home to Patrick Ryan, a man dubbed ‘Britain’s most prolific crook’ after clocking up 468 convictions for 667 offences, including hundreds of thefts and at least one sexual assault.
This month, Highfield House was saddled with its most notorious guest yet, in the shape of Shabir Ahmed, the 73-year-old ringleader of the Rochdale grooming gang.
Ahmed was jailed in 2012 for dozens of rape and child-sex offences, following what have arguably become two of the most consequential trials in the history of the British justice system.
The first, at Liverpool Crown Court, saw him given a 19-year sentence for leading a group of eight Pakistani men and one Afghan who abused 47 girls, some of them as young as 12. The offences took place under the nose of the authorities over a period of more than five years.
Rochdale grooming gang leader Shabir Ahmed who was jailed in 2012 for dozens of rape and child-sex offences
The second, in Manchester shortly afterwards, saw him convicted by a jury of 30 more rape charges, this time concerning an Asian girl who he abused from the age of three until she was an adult. He was given another 22-year sentence, to run concurrently.
That should, in theory, have kept Ahmed behind bars until 2034, were it not for the Labour Party’s Criminal Justice Act of 2003.
This mandates the release of even the most serious offenders (aside from those given life sentences) after serving half of their custodial sentence.
Although the tariff was increased to two-thirds by Boris Johnson’s Tories in 2020, it remained mandatory. Which in turn means that the thrice-divorced father of four, who came to the UK from the Pakistani city of Gujrat in 1967 aged 14, was allowed to leave HMP Wakefield on July 2.
Shabir Ahmed’s fate has been the subject of a heated diplomatic row ever since.
The Government wants to deport him to the land of his birth. But Pakistan is unwilling to take him, saying (correctly, as it happens) that he’s a ‘foreigner’ who renounced his citizenship many years ago.
The country’s foreign minister pointed out this week that the UK was where he ‘grew up, was raised, groomed and, unfortunately, spoiled’.
Andy Burnham is having none of that. ‘I want this vile criminal out of the country,’ he said on X last week.
‘I will ask the home and foreign secretaries to review all possible options – and they should consider nothing is off the table.’
Yet he appears on paper to be powerless to act, thanks to a loophole in the 1971 Immigration Act which prevents Commonwealth citizens who arrived in the UK prior to 1973 from being removed.
And yesterday the Daily Mail revealed that the Government has signed off a £153million aid package to Pakistan despite the fact it is refusing to take him back, thereby giving up a substantial piece of potential leverage.
At the centre of this political mess is Highfield House, where Ahmed arrived in a police car on the day of his release.
The leader of the Rochdale grooming gang is pictured for the first time since leaving prison – at a bail hostel just 15 miles from the scene of his vile crimes
Situated at the end of a long drive, protected by iron gates, it’s surrounded by leafy grounds which contain everything from a duck pond to an outdoor gym and a small football pitch. Outside the front door is a sign advertising cookery and baking classes, plus a sheet of ‘house rules’ written in both English and Arabic.
Entry is controlled by a ‘facial recognition’ doorbell, whose operator refused to answer questions about Ahmed and instead asked me to leave. In the garden is a small collection of gnomes, plus a notice which warns against driving too quickly, to avoid running over the facility’s pet ducks.
The atmosphere is part bucolic, part dystopian. Yet the setting also felt deeply incongruous. For one only needs a passing knowledge of the Rotherham grooming gang scandal to realise that Highfield House was a spectacularly inappropriate place to house this famous child rapist.
For one thing, it’s a short walk from one of Accrington’s most popular parks and children’s playgrounds, and within a mile radius of no fewer than seven schools.
That’s important because Ahmed, a former takeaway driver known to victims as ‘Daddy’, sourced many victims directly from school gates. He would pick up girls in their uniform before trafficking them to flats in Rochdale, Oldham and Bradford, where they would be abused by groups of up to five men at a time.
For another, the place is less than 15 miles (as the crow flies), or half an hour’s drive, from the rapist’s former stomping ground. That’s a proximity which terrifies the rapist’s victims, many of whom remain in the local area.
‘I’m horrified, as I know the survivors will be,’ is the verdict of Maggie Oliver, a former police officer from Greater Manchester who resigned in order to blow the whistle over the force’s failure to protect Ahmed’s victims.
‘To know that he is literally in their backyard beggars belief… it really is the lunatics running the asylum. If I had been making this decision I would have put him at the other end of the country.’
Further adding to the insanity of housing Ahmed at Highfield House is the fact that it sits in the middle of an almost identical community to the one his Rochdale grooming gang terrorised for so many years.
The child rapist, who was dubbed a ‘violent, hypocritical bully’ by a judge, preyed largely on vulnerable white working-class teenagers.
Tahir Andrabi, the Pakistani Foreign Office spokesperson, blamed Britain for ‘spoiling’ the Rochdale grooming gang leader
His modus operandi was to meet them on the streets in deprived areas of the former mill town, invite them back to his Asian takeaway for free food, then ply them with drugs and alcohol so they could be ‘passed around’ for sex with his mostly middle-aged accomplices.
You don’t have to spend very long in Accrington (which is also a historic mill town) to realise that it contains many such neighbourhoods.
In fact, one is adjacent to Highfield House, which is surrounded by hilly, potholed streets where tumbledown terrace houses change hands for as little as £70,000.
Billeting him here has, predictably, gone down badly with community leaders. The local MP, Labour’s Sarah Smith, said his release will ‘bring back unimaginable trauma’ to the women he raped and declared herself ‘disgusted’ that he was placed in the town.
‘I am calling for a much wider exclusion zone so that he is not placed in Lancashire or the North-West,’ she added. ‘He must be deported as soon as possible.’
Muslim community leaders from the town have also expressed outrage at his presence, calling it ‘a serious error of judgment by the relevant authorities’.
In a letter to the local police chief, Kamran Mahmood, the General Secretary of Accrington’s Ghausia Rizvia mosque, which is a short walk from Highfield House, said on Wednesday that it ‘has caused significant distress, fear and anger within our community. Parents are deeply worried about the safety of their children and there is a real risk that these legitimate concerns will lead to rising community tensions’.
Rumours about Ahmed’s presence had in fact begun circulating late last week, when locals noticed that the imposing metal gates of the premises, which are normally left open, had been closed, while two security guards were being employed to stand guard on the driveway 24 hours a day.
One tipped off the Daily Mail about this unusual development. We were then able to speak to several sources within the criminal justice system who confirmed that the notorious rapist was being housed on the premises. One provided a photograph showing him venturing into the garden for exercise.
A fellow resident of the halfway house told me that the ‘old man’ was spending almost his entire time in a room, leaving only for meals and a daily walk around the grounds in late afternoon. He added that Ahmed always dressed in cheap sportswear with a white or black prayer hat.
‘I want this vile criminal out of the country,’ Andy Burnham said on X last week about Shabir Ahmed
A second resident, who agreed to speak out anonymously, added: ‘He came here just after he left prison but never left the hostel. In fact, he rarely left his room. We knew who he was because he was given a police escort when he arrived. There’s maybe 16 or so men here and we can all come and go but have to be back for a certain time, depending on our curfew, and we have to sign in and out.
‘Nobody attacked him – even though we’d have liked to – because we didn’t want to breach the terms of our licence and be recalled to prison.’ On Tuesday afternoon, while we were still attempting to confirm Ahmed’s presence, an anonymous post on a local Facebook Group, Hyndburn Community Chat, claimed Ahmed was at the property.
Within hours, a small group of demonstrators had descended on the premises and he appears to have been whisked away in a police car to an undisclosed location that night.
To understand the level of anger Shabir Ahmed’s presence here – or indeed anywhere – is likely to spark, one need only wind the clock back to his trial, which exposed in spine-chilling detail how his gang treated the teenage girls it recruited as though they were, in the words of the judge, ‘worthless and beyond any respect’. One of their victims was raped 20 times in a single night, while drunk.
As a series of public inquiries, TV dramas and probing news reports would eventually lay bare, the gang’s activities took place under the nose of local authorities, who for years failed to properly intervene out of fear – many critics claim – of exacerbating racial tensions.
Ahmed, a former member of the local Labour Party who had for almost two decades been employed by Oldham Council as a ‘welfare rights officer’ helping migrants at a Pakistani community centre to access benefits, was therefore able to orchestrate his appalling crimes with staggering impunity.
Even in the dock, he was utterly unapologetic, smearing the children he’d abused and accusing the authorities who belatedly came to their aid of racism. Throughout the court cases, he behaved like a man who believed he was somehow untouchable.
Transcripts of proceedings, made by the Daily Mail’s reporter during the 2012 trial at Liverpool Crown Court, still make utterly unnerving reading.
They tell how, at various points, he called the judge a ‘racist bastard’ and blamed his crimes on degenerate white parents who had been ‘training’ their daughters to drink and take part in sexual activity, and had negligently allowed them to ‘parade in the streets’ where they could be preyed upon by older men.
In a bizarre tirade, in which he appeared to overlook the fact that victims were almost all under the age of consent, he also attempted to claim that the teenagers his gang raped were prostitutes, who had freely agreed to provide sexual services to him in exchange for cash.
‘They were clever girls,’ he told the jury. ‘If they had gone on Lord Sugar’s Apprentice programme, they would have won… they knew what they were doing. They were earning good money.’
The second case was similarly grim. This time, he couldn’t moan about courtroom racism, because he was appearing before a judge named Mushtaq Khokhar. Instead, on receiving the verdict, he informed Khokhar: ‘You are talking s**t. It’s all lies concocted by the police…. you will all rot in hell.’ Even after being thrown in jail, Ahmed remained utterly without shame. In February 2016, he appealed to the European Court of Justice, saying his convictions were the result of a conspiracy to ‘scapegoat’ Muslims.
Jurors had been in cahoots with the BNP (the far-Right British National Party), the rapist argued, saying the prosecution had been ‘tailored by police to fit an anti- Muslim prejudice’.
The judges were unimpressed: they threw out his claim in September 2016. By then, Ahmed’s taxpayer-funded lawyers were also ploughing a lucrative furrow fighting efforts to deport him.
In a court hearing that year, the grooming gang leader attacked the then Home Secretary Theresa May, saying: ‘She says all her trouble is coming from Muslims, yet she’s the biggest trouble causer in the world.’ Ahmed had been convicted by ‘11 white jurors’, he moaned, adding: ‘It’s become fashionable to blame everything on Muslims these days.’ The judge, Mr Justice McCloskey, described the conduct of his case as ‘cavalier and unprofessional’.
Be that as it may, solicitors for four members of the Rochdale gang facing deportation had by this point clocked up legal aid bills of £1,009,645. The figure included £249,707 for Ahmed.
At HMP Wakefield, Ahmed’s behaviour was scarcely any better than it had been in court. In 2016, a 71-year-old fellow inmate named James Palmer had responded to the Brussels terror attacks by saying that the men responsible ought to be ‘eradicated’.
Ahmed overheard the remark, threw Palmer to the floor, stamped on his head, broke his nose and threatened to kill him ‘if you insult Muslims again’. As a result, his sentence was in 2017 increased by a year.
Fast forward to 2022 and, during a parole hearing, it emerged that the child rapist had now been appointed as an ‘equalities representative’ in the maximum-security jail, with responsibility for ensuring that guards were properly catering to the needs of Muslim inmates.
How was a child sex offender who blames Western society for his appalling crimes handed this role? The answer is anyone’s guess. As, of course, is Shabir Ahmed’s current location.
For the truth is that the Rochdale grooming gang’s violent ringleader has to live somewhere. And for as long as Pakistan refuses to take him back, that somewhere could be a town near you.
Additional reporting: James Fielding and James Tozer
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