Islam

If it weren’t so depressing, it would almost be funny. Last weekend, the UK watched in horror as the Metropolitan Police unleashed a two-day manhunt for a convicted sex offender and illegal migrant who had been accidentally released from prison.

How did we get here? Hadush Kebatu, a 41-year-old Ethiopian, entered the UK by small boat in June this year and was placed in an asylum centre at the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex. Just a few days after his arrival, he approached a 14-year-old girl wearing her school uniform in Epping town centre, making sexually explicit comments and attempting to kiss her. The next day, he tried to kiss a different woman, before encountering the 14-year-old again and sexually assaulting her. He was arrested and charged.

When Sadiq Khan claimed that his city does not have the same grooming gang culture seen in other cities and towns across the UK, it caused anger and incredulity in many quarters.

But few can have been as disturbed by the London Mayor’s self-vindicating claim as Finella Mackrodt – who remains haunted by the loss of her daughter Jasmine, who took her own life at 17.

Because Ms Mackrodt believes that her daughter’s suicide was a direct consequence of the sexualised grooming she was subjected to by organised gangs which began when she was barely out of primary school.

In the small hours of the morning, retired police detective Jon Wedger is on the streets of Tottenham in northeast London to prove gangs are grooming girls for sex in the capital.

“I worked in the Met Police’s vice squad for years, and I’ve never seen so many in one area,” he says. “That’s where the three young girls are.” Wedger confirms that a Somalian girl aged 12 is “working” alongside two English girls aged 15 and 16.

The former officer, who left the Met in 2017 after 25 years, has joined forces with a documentary crew from IBB Media to show the public that child prostitution is happening in plain sight on London’s streets.

So the grooming-gangs inquiry that the government never wanted to hold is already falling apart. Colour me surprised. Another betrayal of the victims, to put with all the others.

First, thousands of poor and working-class girls were subjected to rape, torture, sometimes murder, by gangs of predominantly Pakistani Muslim men. Then, their plight was covered up or ignored by police and councils who feared ‘race riots’ if word ever got out. Now, some of those same victims are effectively being called liars all over again, this time by central government.