Gang ringleaders Qari Abdul Rauf and Adil Khan face being returned now block on national airline has been lifted.Two ringleaders of the Rochdale grooming scandal could be sent back to Pakistan after the UK dropped its ban on direct flights between the two countries.
Ministers are engaged in talks with the Pakistani government to remove a block on the deportations of Qari Abdul Rauf and Adil Khan, two of Britain’s worst grooming offenders. Both men then renounced their Pakistani citizenship – in a cynical move that made them stateless and consequently much harder to deport due to international law.
In 2022 the men lost an appeal against deportation after a seven-year legal battle that cost the British taxpayer a fortune, but they remain living in Rochdale because Pakistan will not take them back.
But Islamabad’s position could now change, according to reports in The Times and the Telegraph, now that UK ministers have given the green light for direct flights to resume between the two countries.
The country’s national carrier Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) was barred from operating inside the EU and UK in 2020. The ban followed an incident on May 22 that year when a passenger flight from Lahore to Karachi crashed, killing 97 out of the 99 people on board as well as an additional victim on the ground.
Married father-of-five Rauf, a religious studies teacher at a Rochdale mosque, would drive schoolgirls to other men who would rape and abuse them. He walked free in 2014 after serving just two-and-a-half years of a six-year prison sentence.
Last month the Daily Mail revealed he has built a house in his native Pakistan – despite receiving £285,000 of taxpayers’ money in a battle against being deported. The home threw into doubt claims he had cut ties with Pakistan.
Khan was convicted of sex trafficking and conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with a child. He had a baby with one of the victims, who was just 13 at the time. He served four years of an eight-year jail term and was released in 2016.
