Who Is Shabir Ahmed? The Pakistani Grooming Gang Leader At The Centre Of UK's Deportation Law Amendment

The British government is set to amend its immigration law to allow the deportation of notorious ‘grooming gang’ leader and child sexual abuse accused Shabir Ahmed to Pakistan,

Notorious Grooming Gang leader and child sexual abuse accused Shabir Ahmed’s release has now triggered a possible law amendment in the U.K, to allow his deportation to Pakistan.

After spending 14 years in jail, Ahmed walked free under an early release scheme, leaving victims fearful and many people demanding for his deportation to Pakistan.

However, the old British immigration law and Pakistan’s past refusal to accept similar offenders made the issue more complicated. The British government said, it would amend their decades-old framework to expedite the deportation of Ahmed, who was imprisoned for raping and trafficking teenage girls in England’s Rochdale.

The court found him guilty of 30 counts of rape and other serious sexual offences involving minor girls. During the trial, it was revealed that Ahmed and the other gang members targeted girls from poor backgrounds, and gained the victims’ trust by offering free food, cigarettes and alcohol before trapping them in a cycle of repeated sexual and mental abuse.

Reports also suggest that earlier Pakistan had refused to accept Ahmed’s deportation, calling for UK laws to be followed in due course and affirmed that the government of Pakistan had nothing to do with this matter.

Despite that, the U.K government was not been able to deport him immediately because of a provision in its 1971 Immigration Act.

Under the law, Commonwealth citizens who arrived in Britain before 1973 and had legally lived in the country for at least five years were protected from deportation in many cases.

Since Pakistan was a member of the Commonwealth at that time and Ahmed arrived in Britain in the late 1960s, he fell under this legal protection. This made it difficult for British authorities to remove him from the country, despite the seriousness of his crimes.