Ringleader of Rotherham grooming gang jailed again for raping girl, 13, after plying her with alcohol
THE ringleader of a Rotherham grooming gang has been jailed again after raping a 13-year-old girl in a sickening campaign of abuse.
Mohammed Imran Ali Akhtar, 42, plied the girl with alcohol and drugs before driving her to different locations to attack her.
He has now been handed 12 years in jail after pleading guilty to two counts of rape and two counts of indecent assault.
The sentence will run concurrently with the 23-year jail term he was handed in 2018 for for a string of previous sex offences against young girls.
His latest victim came forward after seeing news reports of his convictions.
She was described at Sheffield Crown Court as a “very vulnerable girl living in difficult circumstances”.
Akhtar groomed the teen after targeting her while driving through Rotherham town centre.
He abused her four or five times a week for a year and if she refused, the fiend threatened to leave her stranded in the middle of nowhere.
On one occasion she was forced to walk for hours after Akhtar kicked her out the car in the early hours of the morning when she said no.
Sickeningly, Akhtar groomed the young girl into believing she was in a relationship with him.
In her police interview, she said when “sees someone that vaguely resembles the defendant, it makes her feel sick”.
Sentencing, Judge Sarah Wright said: “I commend the bravery of the victim in coming forward after all this time.
“Her childhood and adolescence can never be reclaimed, the effect of your (Akhtar’s) offending on her cannot be overestimated.
“She was an extremely vulnerable young girl who came from difficult family circumstances and was clearly looking for attention.”
He was jailed in November 2018 for his role as a “ringleader” in a seven-man Asian grooming gang in Rotherham.
The predators subjected the girls to “acts of degrading and violent nature”.
One victim had sex with “at least 100 Asian men” by the time she was 16, while another was gang-raped in a forest and threatened with being abandoned.
Akhtar and the gang were the first to be prosecuted under Operation Stovewood – the National Crime Agency’s (NCA) inquiry into historical child sexual exploitation in Rotherham.
The large-scale probe has identified more than 1,500 victims and was set up in 2014 in the wake of the damning Jay Report that exposed the shocking scale of exploitation between 1997 and 2013.