Description
Operating from Oxford's Cowley Road area in what the court heard was a "sub-culture where there was little moral compass," brothers Akhtar and Anjum Dogar alongside Mohammed and Bassam Karrar orchestrated a calculated campaign of sexual exploitation against vulnerable girls as young as 11 that Judge Peter Rook QC described as involving "extreme depravity" and crimes of "the utmost gravity." Between approximately 2004 and 2012, the Oxford grooming gang systematically targeted troubled teenagers from unsettled home lives, grooming them with drugs including heroin and cocaine before subjecting them to repeated rape and trafficking them to "vast numbers of strangers" brought from Bradford, Leeds, Slough, and London in what amounted to a commercial sex operation. The abuse reached horrific extremes: Mohammed Karrar branded one 12-year-old victim with his initial using a hot hairpin to mark her as his "commodity," beat her with a baseball bat then inserted its metal handle into her vagina, and prepared her for gang rape by multiple men while a ball was placed in her mouth to keep her quiet, while the Dogar brothers and Kamar Jamil took another victim to remote Shotover Woods at night, forced her to perform oral sex on them and four other men while threatening to "cut her throat," then abandoned her in the darkness. The ringleaders received life sentences—Mohammed Karrar got a 20-year minimum (equivalent to 40 years) for his "exceptional depravity," the Dogar brothers each received 17-year minimums (equivalent to 34 years), and Bassam Karrar got 15 years—while associates Assad Hussain and Zeeshan Ahmed, who exploited other underage victims for their own "predatory sexual interest," each received seven years for their roles in the abuse that Judge Rook said had "blighted lives and robbed them of their adolescence."