Greater Manchester Police failures have left paedophile ring at large for seven years, whistleblower claims

Published

2 years ago

January 22, 2024

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A whistleblower who resigned from Greater Manchester Police has told Sky News the force’s child protection investigation unit where she worked is “not fit for purpose” and that failures have left a paedophile ring at large for at least seven years.

In her resignation letter last year, she said: “I don’t feel like we’re making things better for these kids. In fact, I think we’re making it worse.”

She also said that her work with the victims only served to “re-traumatise them” and “leave them hanging.”

Assigned a major operation into child sex offenders in Manchester in 2022, the detective constable we are calling “Lucy” says failures could have allowed the continuation of what she says “professionals have called some of the worst abuse they’ve ever seen.”

She first noticed a problem when she picked up the investigation and realised there had been two previous complaints involving the same suspects and other children, dating back to 2018. One where the case had been closed.

She told Sky News: “A lot of the professional material such as children’s records, medical records and school records had not been requested, had not been read because if they had, they would say that many of the children had reported multiple disclosures of sexual abuse, physical abuse, neglect and psychological torture.”

The 2018 case was reopened. Lucy realised she was leading a complex investigation with very young victims, whose trust she needed to gain, but says she was managing numerous caseloads and was not given the time or the resources to do the job.

She said: “I wanted to go and see them regularly, but the time just wasn’t made available to me. And so, you’d go and speak to them, you’d bring it all back up, re-traumatise them, and then you’d leave them hanging.

“I had a Teams meeting with the DCI. He’s making all these promises to me. ‘I’ll get you the resources’. It just didn’t happen.”

She added: “You just got a lot of shoulder shrugging. You know, ‘it’s out of my hands’ sort of thing.

“I know that superintendent level knew about this. So it goes that far up. You start to realise it doesn’t matter how far up you go, nobody’s going to listen.”

Last week a report into Greater Manchester Police (GMP) found multiple failures in a grooming gang investigation in Rochdale over a decade ago.

At a news conference, Chief Constable Steve Watson said “lessons had been learned”, but Maggie Oliver, the detective who blew the whistle on the scandal, said he was wrong – and told the room about recently resigned officer Lucy.

Speaking directly to the chief constable sat in front of her, Ms Oliver said: “That officer could have been me 12 years ago.

“She had been banging on doors. She has been desperately trying to get a very serious case where many, many children are being abused, taken seriously.”

‘It’s still happening’

Lucy says the force hasn’t learned from its failings.

“It is still happening. It’s appalling the treatment these victims get… And it’s not just failing the victims, it’s failing the community.”

She says she felt she had “the workload of six or seven people”, and that she was encouraged to focus on just two victims rather than look at the bigger picture, which echoes complaints made by Ms Oliver in the Rochdale case over a decade ago. Although GMP has subsequently told us it is investigating a larger number of victims.

Lucy says it began to impact her mental health.

“I just felt like my head was buzzing. I felt like I couldn’t sleep, even though I was exhausted. At one point I felt like I was losing my marbles, and it was just too much for me.

“I thought, I can’t change anything. I can’t keep saying the same thing. It’s draining the life out of me.

“The thought that I was failing them, it was just too much for me.”

After five years in the force, Lucy resigned, putting in a formal complaint about the investigation.

She says: “I sent an email. I said this resourcing issue is bigger than all of us. I said, ‘But I don’t feel like we’re making things better for these kids. In fact, I think we’re making it worse.’

“And I said, ‘I don’t think this child protection unit is fit for purpose’. And my inspector didn’t even speak to me about it. She just pretended like it hadn’t happened.”

She says morale among the other staff is low.

“It’s just awful. You know, people just want to leave. People are crying because of the problem and in my exit interview, I said ‘you haven’t got enough staff’.”

Calls for serious case review

She is now calling for a serious case review into the investigation she was working on.

“I think a lot of offenders were involved. I think if they were allowed to follow the lines of inquiry, I think they would find it was a massive, massive job. It’s a paedophile ring. That’s what I think it is.” she says.

“It’s 20 months since I was involved. It’s seven years since the first child came forward. So that’s a failure.”

A GMP spokesperson said: “We are concerned to hear how this former detective feels about this operation.

“GMP has a significant number of officers across the force working in child protection roles, with large increases in staff allocated to these roles in recent years. It is absolutely accurate to say that the situation is much different to GMP’s approach in the past.

“However, we are not complacent. The former officer escalated her concerns to the chief constable’s office last week.

“The issues raised, and the investigation mentioned, are being reviewed by a detective superintendent and the assistant chief constable who holds the public protection and serious crime portfolio.”

They added: “In respect of this case, crucially, we can confirm that the children in question had been subject to safeguarding arrangements for several years before reports of non-recent abuse were made.

“The children involved were protected and are all safe and well and have been throughout the course of the investigation.

“A team of four officers continue to investigate reports of domestic incidents. Two suspects remain under investigation and reviews have been taking place every six weeks since January 2023.”

UK

‘I’m deprived of my UK citizenship but I’m not a convicted terrorist’

Published

14 hours ago

August 24, 2025

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'I'm deprived of my UK citizenship but I'm not a convicted terrorist'

Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) went from a jihadist movement once aligned to al Qaeda to forming the official government of Syria.

It was a monumental transformation for them, their country and the wider Middle East.

But potentially too for British people who went to Syria – and who were stripped of their citizenship as a result, on the grounds of national security.

Tauqir Sharif, better known as Tox, went to Syria in 2012 as an aid worker. He was accused of being part of a group affiliated with al Qaeda, which he denies, and the then-home secretary Amber Rudd deprived him of his British citizenship in 2017.

“As of now, I am deprived of my UK citizenship but I’m not a convicted terrorist – and the reason for that is because we refused, we boycotted, the SIAC [Special Immigration Appeals Commission] secret courts, which don’t allow you to see any of the evidence presented against you,” he said.

“And one of the things that I always called for was, look, put me in front of a jury, let’s have an open hearing.”

HTS is still a proscribed terrorist organisation but the British government has now established relations with it.

Foreign Secretary David Lammy travelled to Damascus to meet the jihadist-turned-Syrian interim president – the man who swapped his nom de guerre of al Jolani for Ahmed al Sharaa.

If the UK government takes HTS off the terror list, what does that mean for those who lost their citizenship after being accused of being part of it?

People who joined HTS are only a subset among the scores of people who have had their citizenship revoked – a tool the UK government has been quick to use.

According to a report by the Parliamentary Joint Human Rights Committee, the UK “uses deprivation of citizenship orders more than almost any country in the world”.

The peak of that was in 2017, and mainly in relation to Syria – especially in the case of people joining Islamic State, perhaps most famously Shamima Begum.

And because people cannot be made entirely stateless, and need to have a second nationality, or be potentially eligible for one, there are worries of racism in who the orders apply to.

Countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh offer dual nationality, whereas other nations do not. In 2022, the Institute of Race Relations said “the vast majority of those deprived are Muslim men with South Asian or Middle Eastern/North African heritage”.

Legal grey areas

Sky News submitted Freedom of Information requests to the Home Office asking for a breakdown of second nationalities of those deprived of citizenship, but was refused twice on national security grounds.

The independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, Jonathan Hall KC, told Sky News there are issues around transparency.

“I do think there is a problem when you have people whose relationship with the country that they’re left with is really technical and they may never have realised that they had that citizenship before and may never gone to that country,” he said.

“Me and my predecessors have all said, owing to how frequently this power is used, it should be something that the independent reviewer should have the power to review. I asked, my predecessor asked, we’ve both been told no, so I agree there’s a lack of transparency.”

No automatic reversal

Even if the government does remove HTS from the terror list, it would not automatically invalidate decisions to deprive people of their citizenship.

Macer Gifford gave up a career as a banker in London to join the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) as a foreign volunteer between 2015 and 2017.

He told Sky News that decisions “made years ago in the interest of the British public have to remain”.

“We can’t sort of go through previous cases nitpicking through it, wasting time and money to bring it up to date,” he added.

“We can’t be naive because the intent to go out, the decision to go in itself is a huge decision for them. So it shows commitment when they’re there, they then, if they take an active participation in the organisations that they’ve been accused of joining, again, that involves training and perseverance and dedication to the cause.”

But those born and raised in Britain, who joined the same cause, and lost their citizenship as a result, might reasonably ask why that should remain the case.

UK

Criminals could be banned from pubs and sports grounds under new plans

Published

14 hours ago

August 24, 2025

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Criminals could be banned from pubs and sports grounds under new plans

Criminals face being banned from pubs, sports grounds and concerts under new government plans to give judges powers to pass tougher community sentences.

The new measures, which would apply to people in England and Wales, “should remind all offenders that, under this government, crime does not pay”, Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood said.

Offenders’ freedom could also be curtailed with limits on driving, travel bans and restriction zones confining them to specific areas, the government said.

Similar measures could also apply to prisoners let out on licence, while drug testing would be expanded to include all those released, rather than just those with a history of substance misuse.

While judges are currently able to impose limited bans for specific crimes, such as football bans for crimes committed inside a stadium on match day, the new measures would allow for such bans to be handed down for any offence.

The justice secretary said: “When criminals break society’s rules, they must be punished.

“Those serving their sentences in the community must have their freedom restricted there too.

“These new punishments should remind all offenders that, under this government, crime does not pay.

“Rightly, the public expect the government to do everything in its power to keep Britain safe, and that’s what we’re doing.”

The proposals are part of the Labour government’s efforts to tackle overcrowding in prisons.

Back in June, it emerged that prisoners were to be transferred to lower security jails in an effort to ease overcrowding, as part of a new measure quietly unveiled by the government.

Sky News reported earlier this month how the prison system was close to collapse on a number of occasions between autumn 2023 and summer 2024, according to an independent review by former chief inspector of prisons, Dame Anne Owers.

The report said there was a systemic problem which has led to recurring prison capacity crises over the last 18 years.

UK

Police separate anti-immigration and anti-racism protesters across the country

Published

1 day ago

August 23, 2025

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Police separate anti-immigration and anti-racism protesters across the country

Protesters have gathered across the country as groups demonstrated against asylum seeker housing and were met by anti-racism campaigners.

Demonstrations under the Abolish Asylum System slogan were held in England, Scotland and Wales, including in Bristol, Exeter, Tamworth, Cannock, Aberdeen, Mold, Perth, Nuneaton, Liverpool, Wakefield, Newcastle, Horley and Canary Wharf.

Counter-protests were also organised by campaign group Stand Up to Racism.

In Bristol, mounted police separated the two groups in the Castle Park, with officers scuffling with protesters.

Police kept around 200 anti-immigration protesters draped in English flags away from roughly 50 Stand Up to Racism protesters in Horley, Surrey.

One man, wearing a West Ham United football shirt, was held by police as he yelled: “You’re not welcome here, you’re not welcome here, you’re not welcome here” at anti-racism protesters.

Anti-immigration protesters also chanted: “Tommy, Tommy, Tommy, Tommy Robinson” in support of the far-right activist, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.

The anti-racism protesters chanted “say it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here” and held signs calling for solidarity and to “stop deportations”.

The Stand Up to Racism protesters were shepherded into a smaller area as they continued to chant: “No hate, no fear, refugees are welcome here”, which was met with “No they’re f****** not” from the other side of the street.

In Perth, protesters gathered outside the Radisson Hotel.

The anti-migration protesters held up signs with slogans such as “Perth is full – empty the hotels” and “get them out”.

Stand Up to Racism Scotland said it had achieved “victory” in Perth, with more than 200 gathering to oppose the Abolish Asylum System demonstration.

In Liverpool, a dispersal order was issued to try and contain the protests.

Saturday’s events come amid continued tension around the use of the hotels for asylum seekers.

Regular protests had been held outside the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, which started after an asylum seeker housed there was charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl on 10 July.

Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu, 38, was charged with trying to kiss a teenage girl and denies the allegations. He is due to stand trial later this month.

In the wake of those protests, Epping Forest District Council sought and won an interim High Court injunction to stop migrants from being accommodated there – a decision which the government is seeking permission to appeal.