SEVEN MEN WERE convicted in London today for sexually abusing underage girls, including one who was just 11-years-old, by plying them with alcohol and drugs before forcing them to commit sex acts.
The guilty verdict followed five months of testimony indicating the paedophile sex ring exploited girls between 2004 and 2012 in the Oxford area, some 95 kilometers northwest of London.
Speaking in the Old Bailey in London, chief prosecutor Baljit Ubhey said the girls were subjected to “truly appalling” abuse by a network of perpetrators.
“No one, let alone a child, should ever be exploited as these young victims were,” she said. “The men who have been convicted have still failed to accept any responsibility for their crimes. They are nothing less than vicious sexual predators.”
Prosecutors said seven of the men on trial were of Pakistani descent and two had family roots in North Africa.
Most of the victims — whose names cannot be released for legal reasons — gave evidence from behind a curtain at the five-month trial, describing forced encounters and intimidation.
One described how she was even threatened with arrest for wasting police time when she tried to report the abuse. She wept as she recounted how the gang threatened to burn her brother alive unless she had sex with them, saying that nothing happened after she went to police when she had decided to break away from her abusers.
“They threatened on a number of occasions to arrest me for wasting police time for turning up at a police station in a state after running away,” she told the court. “Any self-respecting police officer would have seen something was wrong. If you pick up a child who is covered in cigarette burns and bruises, something is fundamentally wrong.”
Another victim said the men told her she would be shot if she did not have sex with them. She was 14 at the time.
The convicted men will be kept in custody until they are sentenced next month.
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