Seventeen men and one woman from a Newcastle sex gang will be sentenced over the next three days for crimes that include rape, sexual assault, drug dealing, and inciting girls into prostitution. Three members have already been jailed for a total of 56 years for using mephedrone to turn abuse victims into addicts and forced them to have sex. Mohammed Azram, 35, picked up girls from a courtyard in Newcastle's West End, giving them drugs.
He has been sentenced to 12 and a half years while his rapist accomplices Jahangir Zaman, 45, was given 29 years and Shafiq Aziz was given 15 years for drugs offences. Teenaged girls were hooked on to drugs, with one not eating for a week because of the addiction. However, her abusers would only give her more after she performed sex acts on them. Prosecutor John Elvidge QC said the victims that gave evidence in court were white British and the male defendants were “all of Asian extraction” and mostly British-born. He added that authorities however, decided their offending was not motivated racially.
The three men were part of a 40-membered network that included Pakistani, Indian, Iranian, Iraqi, Bangladeshi and Turkish nationals that preyed on over 100 girls. In their impact statements, victims said they were treated like a “piece of meat” by their abusers. One woman called the gang “monsters”. A woman was also cited, who, one victim said appeared to being treated as a “slave”. She said the men boasted about the “slave” who “would do anything sexually in return for money and drugs”.
Victims spoke of going through long-term effects in several aspects of their lives as a result of their ordeals. “These people made me feel like they were my friends and made me feel supported. I thought they were my friends, they made me feel nice about myself.” The prosecutions came after Operation Shelter, a long running investigation into sexual exploitation, largely in Newcastle's West End. The inquiry involved the controversial use of a police informant- a child rapist himself. Elvidge said, “The court heard that the women who were being exploited sometimes consented, sometimes did not consent and sometimes were incapable of consenting.”
