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The five leading figures in the Oxford paedophile sex ring were jailed for life today for carrying out “true evil.”
At the head of a seven-strong gang, they displayed “extreme depravity” and in at least one case “took the soul” of their young girl victims.
In sentencing Judge Peter Rook QC praised the immense courage of the victims to give evidence at the Old Bailey despite knowing they would be accused by their abusers of lying about their terrible ordeals.
Mohammed Karrar, 38, was handed two life sentences and ordered to serve a minimum of 20 years after being convicted of 18 charges.
His brother Bassam Karrar, 33, also received two life sentences of at least 15 years for nine charges.
The two ring leaders, the brothers Akhtar Dogar, 32, and Anjum Dogar, 31, both received three life sentences with a minimum of 17 years.
Kamar Jamil, 27, received a life sentence with a minimum of 12 years, Zeeshan Ahmed, 27, and Assad Hussain, 32, were both jailed for seven years each.
All but Hussain were said by the judge to pose a serious future risk to young girls.
The gang had been convicted last month after the jury heard how the girl victims were drugged, raped, trafficked and used as prostitutes while supposedly in the safe-keeping of the local authority in Oxford.
The gang - five men of Pakistani origin and two from North Africa – were found guilty of more than 40 charges spanning eight years, including rape, trafficking and organising prostitution.
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The verdicts had led to apologies by police and social workers for their failures to protect the young victims.
Some as young as 11, they had all been targeted because they were vulnerable, drinking and taking drugs.
Today some were back in court and wept as the paedophiles sentenced.
Said the judge: “These were crimes of the utmost gravity. You exploited and abused these highly vulnerable young girls. On occasions the depravity was extreme.”
Detailing the suffering of each young victim in turn, the judge said that they became “entangled in true evil.”
All of them have suffered mental scars as well as the physical abuse. In one case “you took her soul, she felt it had been ripped out and she hated herself.”
In all six girls were abused between the ages of 11 and 15 in the Cowley area of Oxford.
The victims were forced to relive their horrors in some of the most distressing witness evidence heard at the Old Bailey.
One after the other, they broke down as they described how they were groomed, beaten, betrayed and sold into prostitution around the country.
One told how, aged 11, she was branded by a trafficker and loaned to other abusers for £600 an hour.
He had used a heated hairpin to carve her flesh to mark her as his property.
Over five years she was repeatedly raped by large groups of men in what she described as “torture sex.”
She was so frightened of her attacker that she refused to give evidence for fear he would hurt her again.
It was only after she was given legal advice that Girl D agreed to tell her story from a videolink from another room in the building.
Another victim, Girl A, complained of her plight to police on two occasions but no one was charged.
A care home manager refused to pay her taxi fare when she returned after absconding. The then 14-year-old was driven back to Oxford to be raped.
The worker was later sacked and the privately-run home where girls were placed by Oxford county council was closed down.
In a hearing yesterday statements from some of the victims' parents were read out to the court, which described how the men had ruined theirs and their daughters' lives.
One of the girls had considered suicide while another suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the abuse, which took place between 2004 and last year in the Oxford area.
One of the mothers wrote of how the family was even forced to leave their home leading to her daughter receiving a phone call in which she was threatened with having her face cut off, and members of her family having their throat slit and being decapitated.