The Rochdale grooming gang that has run up £2m bill for taxpayers after fighting attempts to deport them
by Richard Marsden, Daily Mail:
Members of a child sex grooming gang have cost taxpayers more than £2m in legal aid bills while battling deportation – with £285,000 paid to the ringleader, it emerged yesterday.
The fees were run up by nine members of a paedophile gang from Rochdale, Greater Manchester, at a string of court hearings to avoid being kicked out of Britain.
Some of the abusers, who were convicted of rape and other sex offences in 2012, used human rights legislation to avoid repeated attempts to have them deported to Pakistan.
A top immigration judge accused lawyers acting for the group of ‘weakening the rule of law’ by obstructing the courts and using time-wasting tactics.
The groomer who racked up the highest amount of fees was gang ringleader Qari Abdul Rauf, who received legal aid totalling £285,000, The Times reported.
Rauf, now 55, has returned to Rochdale since his release from prison in 2014 after serving two-and-a-half years of a six-year-sentence for trafficking a 15-year-old girl for sex and for having sex with her himself.
When sentenced in 2012, the father-of-five – who worked as a taxi driver and was a religious studies teacher at a mosque – was described as a ‘deeply hypocritical individual’ by Judge Gerald Clifton.
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