9 October 2010: Following years of sexual abuse by Pakistani men, Laura Wilson (17) is murdered by Ashtiaq Ashgar (17) near Meadowhall, Rotherham, in what police call an “honour killing”
Andrew Norfolk. 2011/12/02. Girl Murdered for ‘Shaming’ Family Was Groomed at 12. Times. London. Get it:
.Unedited excerpt
The excerpt in the book is shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.
A teenager murdered after she brought “shame” on the British Pakistani family of a young man with whom she was having sex had been groomed from the age of 12 to be used for sex by adults, The Times reveals today.
Laura Wilson, 17, was stabbed and thrown into a canal in October 2010, five years after child protection workers first identified her as being at high risk of being sexually exploited. Since 2005, care staff had compiled a large file on her case. Links were identified between Laura, other young girls and a number of British Pakistani men in her home town of Rotherham, South Yorkshire.
Workers at a child sexual exploitation project sent a report to Rotherham social services but no action was taken to remove her from what became a continuing cycle of sexual abuse.
In 2007, when she was 13, Laura and her family appeared on ITV1’s The Jeremy Kyle Show and during the programme about out-of-control children her elder sister warned her in front of a million television viewers that “your attitude is going to get you in big danger”.
A month after her 16th birthday in 2009, Laura became pregnant by a 20-year-old married man, Ishaq Hussain, during a brief affair that interrupted her sexual relationship with a teenager, Ashtiaq Asghar. They were the latest in a succession of men, most of them British Pakistanis in their twenties and thirties, who were suspected by care professionals of exploiting the girl for sex over a five-year period.
Laura, who had slight learning difficulties, gave birth in June last year. Four months later, a few days before her death, she “shamed” Asghar and Mr Hussain by informing their families of her sexual history with both men.
Asghar’s mother was furious. She hit Laura with a shoe, said her son would never have a baby with a white girl and called her “a dirty white bitch” who should “keep your legs closed”, a murder trial jury at Sheffield Crown Court was told last month. Nicholas Campbell, QC, for the prosecution, said that in subsequent text messages the pair mounted “a mission to kill Laura Wilson”. In one, Asghar told Mr Hussain: “I’m gonna send that kuffar [non-Muslim] bitch straight to hell.” He talked of buying a pistol and “making some beans on toast”, a reference to spilling blood. Mr Campbell said the men decided that Laura was “a loose cannon and they had to get rid of her”.
Asghar lured her to a late-night meeting by a canal and stabbed her several times. One wound was seven inches deep. He pushed her into the water and, when she still “put up a valiant fight” used the point of the knife to force her head below the surface.
Laura was murdered at the same time as a two-month criminal trial last year at which eight British Pakistanis from Rotherham, aged from 20 to 30, were accused of child-sex offences, including rape, against four local girls aged from 13 to 17. Five men were convicted and jailed. Their prosecution came after a police inquiry, Operation Central, that began in 2008. The Times understands that although South Yorkshire knew of concerns about Laura she was not directly involved in the Central investigation.
Asghar and Mr Hussain stood trial for Laura’s murder in May. Asghar, 18, changed his plea to guilty and a retrial for Mr Hussain, now 22, began last month. He was found not guilty yesterday. Asghar will be sentenced later.
Simon Csoka, for Mr Hussain, said his client was “an unfaithful philanderer whose attitude to women … absolutely stinks … but although he’s guilty of many things, he’s not guilty of murder”. Mr Hussain slept with many women because he was “in a completely loveless arranged marriage”.
Laura’s links with Rotherham’s child sexual exploitation project, Risky Business, and the fact that police services knew that as a child she was having sex with adult Pakistanis did not feature in the murder trial and has never been publicly acknowledged.
Rotherham Safeguarding Board, which co-ordinates agency work, undertook a serious case review after Laura’s death but its findings have not been published. Alan Hazell, its chairman, said: “Laura’s situation was complex, which made it difficult for agencies to engage with her, but there were times when agencies may have worked differently or more effectively”.
A national assessment of street grooming was ordered earlier after an investigation by The Times exposed a hidden pattern of child-sex offending involving groups of Pakistani men and girls aged from 12 to 16.
Comment
Comment
The date range of Saturday 9- Tuesday 12 October is given here (Meadowhall shopping centre location here), Jayne Senior says she was told on Monday that a bloodstained shoe had been found (Senior 2016), but I am told that Laura was almost certainly murdered on the Saturday evening. See other contemporary pieces in The Times for documentation of the suspected abuse of Laura and the hundreds of other victims, and of the action taken by council officials and South Yorkshire Police to conceal it.
Jayne Senior talks inter alia at length about Laura Wilson. For example:
We’d worked on and off with Laura for many years. As part of a tactic to threaten another girl, she’d been driven down the motorway by a group of men and watched as these men made the other girl drink something out of a bottle she believed was ‘spiked’. Laura was just ten years old at the time and the family became embroiled in a horrendous situation. As time went on, threats were made against the family and Laura stopped going to school. Her social worker and the school who referred her said she was giving favours to men in the backrooms of takeaways in return for alcohol and there was even an incident when a gun was pointed at her. In her mid teens she started to date an Asian boy a year older than her by the name of Ashtiaq Ashgar. He was on our database of people we believed to be involved in CSE in that he was befriending and grooming girls of his age who would then be passed up to older men, and we mentioned him in our meetings as having links to other abusers.
On the police investigation and prosecution:
My mouth dropped open. I couldn’t believe it. An ‘honour killing’? Like she’d somehow had a hand in her own murder? All the agencies were saying this child was being groomed for abuse from the age of ten and now here she was, dead, at just seventeen. There was no ‘honour’ in that. To my mind, this was the result of child sexual abuse, no question. Laura was a very needy and vulnerable girl who was taken advantage of and paid the price for her involvement with a group of abusers and their wide net of associates. Had she not been caught up with these people, she would have undoubtedly been alive today. The honour killing tag was completely inappropriate (Senior 2016).
Were there any indication of shame on the part of Asghar, Hussain, or any others of those implicated in her murder, then a modern Shakespeare would have material. But there is not.
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- Adultery (8) W/G ·
- Alcohol (drug) (62) W/G ·
- Andrew Norfolk (1) W/G ·
- Arranged marriage (3) W/G ·
- British Pakistanis (3) W/G ·
- Child sexual abuse (7) W/G ·
- Honour killing (2), traditional form of murder where a person, usually female, is killed by or at the behest of members of their family or their partner, due to culturally or religiously sanctioned beliefs that such homicides are necessary as retribution for the perceived dishonoring of the family by the victim W/G ·
- Islam (5) W/G ·
- Knife (4) W/G ·
- Meadowhall (shopping centre) (1) W/G ·
- Murder (38) W/G ·
- Pedophilia (2) W/G ·
- Racism (8) W/G ·
- Rape (5) W/G ·
- Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council (2) W/G ·
- Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal (2) W/G ·
- Rotherham (21) W/G ·
- Sexual grooming (2) W/G ·
- Sheffield & Tinsley Canal (2) W/G ·
- 📌Sheffield (80) W/G ·
- South Yorkshire Police (3) W/G ·
- South Yorkshire (10) W/G ·
Comment
Comment
The date range of Saturday 9- Tuesday 12 October is given here (Meadowhall shopping centre location here), Jayne Senior says she was told on Monday that a bloodstained shoe had been found (Senior 2016), but I am told that Laura was almost certainly murdered on the Saturday evening. See other contemporary pieces in The Times for documentation of the suspected abuse of Laura and the hundreds of other victims, and of the action taken by council officials and South Yorkshire Police to conceal it.
Jayne Senior talks inter alia at length about Laura Wilson. For example:
We’d worked on and off with Laura for many years. As part of a tactic to threaten another girl, she’d been driven down the motorway by a group of men and watched as these men made the other girl drink something out of a bottle she believed was ‘spiked’. Laura was just ten years old at the time and the family became embroiled in a horrendous situation. As time went on, threats were made against the family and Laura stopped going to school. Her social worker and the school who referred her said she was giving favours to men in the backrooms of takeaways in return for alcohol and there was even an incident when a gun was pointed at her. In her mid teens she started to date an Asian boy a year older than her by the name of Ashtiaq Ashgar. He was on our database of people we believed to be involved in CSE in that he was befriending and grooming girls of his age who would then be passed up to older men, and we mentioned him in our meetings as having links to other abusers.
On the police investigation and prosecution:
My mouth dropped open. I couldn’t believe it. An ‘honour killing’? Like she’d somehow had a hand in her own murder? All the agencies were saying this child was being groomed for abuse from the age of ten and now here she was, dead, at just seventeen. There was no ‘honour’ in that. To my mind, this was the result of child sexual abuse, no question. Laura was a very needy and vulnerable girl who was taken advantage of and paid the price for her involvement with a group of abusers and their wide net of associates. Had she not been caught up with these people, she would have undoubtedly been alive today. The honour killing tag was completely inappropriate (Senior 2016).
Were there any indication of shame on the part of Asghar, Hussain, or any others of those implicated in her murder, then a modern Shakespeare would have material. But there is not.
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Similar
10 December 1769: Part of the northern ballad about Bill Brown, a Brightside (Sheffield) steelworker and hare-poacher killed by gamekeepers today near Rotherham
Comment
Comment
Re this wave of unofficial strikes:
Major-General Sir Noel Holmes, chairman of the north-eastern division of the National Coal Board, in a statement yesterday on the strike at Grimethorpe Colliery, said that 140 coal-face workers, out of 2,682 employed at the pit, were not doing a fair day’s work. A committee representing management and workmen had decided that the stint for the 140 workers should be increased by 2ft., but they refused to accept its findings and came out on strike. The other coal-face workers came out in sympathy. “As much as I dislike mentioning this fact,” said Sir Noel Holmes, “it is only right to recall that at Grimethorpe since January 1, 1947, and before the present strike, there have been 26 sectional unofficial stoppages, which have lost 33,000 tons of coal to the nation. The present stoppage up to date represents a further loss of more than 40,000 tons.” (Times 1947/08/27)
Holmes’s Wikipedia article curiously doesn’t mention this phase of his career.
I’m guessing that the Welsh ex-Puritan authoritarian Communist Arthur Horner is the voice of the NUM in the above – see e.g. the Times for 9 September.
Interesting comments on the wartime coal boards by T.S. Charlton, colliery manager at Cortonwood:
The management of the collieries is in the hands of men trained primarily in management of mines and miners. They have a working knowledge of all the machinery available and how best it can be used, but the details of this side are left to the mechanical and electrical engineer. Labour costs are two-thirds of production costs, and therefore the handling and the best use of men are of the greatest importance to managers. Why it should have been decided that labour leaders should be good labour directors is, apart from the political issue, difficult to understand, unless it is on the old adage of “poacher turned gamekeeper.” Unless and until the production director has control of his labour side, I can see little hope of his schemes proving effective.
The miners have put forward suggestions to improve output, but they appear to do no more than improve the position of the miner. Can it be said that any suggestion already put forward by the men has put up the output figure? Why should it be assumed the men’s side of the pit production committees should be able to improve output in any way? Their training, inclinations, and very job depend upon their obtaining the best for their electors rather than for production.
(Charlton 1943/12/01)
Charlton was clearly a clever and capable man – it would be good to know more about him.
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