Islam versus Europe

A girl who was allegedly sold for sex to restaurant workers told a court that she wanted to give evidence for the sake of “other young girls”.

The teenager, who was 16 when she is said to have been used as a child prostitute by two brothers, Ahdel Ali, 23, and Mubarek Ali, 28, admitted that a few months before the trial she and a friend had told police that they wanted to retract their statements.

She said that this was because Mubarek Ali told her friend that he and the other defendants would then be able to sue the court and receive “loads of” compensation money, which they said they would share with the girls.

“The police kind of talked me out of it,” she told Dean Kershaw, defending one of seven men facing 52 child-sex charges linked to the alleged grooming and sexual exploitation of girls between 2007 and 2009 in Wellington, near Telford, Shropshire.

When Mr Kershaw asked the girl, now aged 19, why she changed her mind and decided to give evidence in the trial she replied: “I’ve done it for other young girls.”

The jury at Stafford Crown Court has already been told that the alleged offences took place during an unhappy period in the girl’s life.

Cross-examined by another defence barrister, Peter Cooper, she agreed that she had a very difficult relationship with her mother and stepfather and from the age of 16 had been living in “a series of bed and breakfast places, sometimes for very short periods of time”.

The jury was told that during this period the girl and her friend had sex with the Ali brothers and were twice taken to a restaurant by Mubarek Ali, who spoke “in Pakistani” to one of the workers.

She said the girls were told to wait in the car until the restaurant closed, then climbed a metal staircase and crawled in through a back window because the workers did not want to be seen with white girls.

On the first occasion her friend had sex with three men in a flat above the restaurant. They gave her £150, some of which was later given to Mubarek Ali, who was waiting for them outside, she said.

The witness is the third of seven alleged child-sex victims who are due to give evidence in a trial that began almost three months ago.