Horror stories of the Rochdale grooming gang victims: A fatal heroin injection from an older man, a secret DNA test on an aborted foetus kept in a freezer and the girl kept in a cage and made to act like a dog

A teenage girl who died from a heroin injection, an aborted foetus taken by police without the mother’s knowledge and one child made to act like a dog in a cage are just some of the horror stories brought about by Rochdale’s grooming gangs.

Dozens of young girls were targeted, abused and raped by gangs of mainly Asian men between 2004 and 2012 in the Greater Manchester town, with police and council bosses failing to investigate credible evidence.

A new report published today revealed the plight faced by the girls who were the subject of this abuse and the struggle they faced to be believed, as well as the harassment when they gave evidence against their abusers.

The damning dossier, which has identified 96 men who are still deemed a potential risk to children, has sparked calls from whistleblowers that there is ‘categorically’ still grooming taking place in the town.

The report makes for distressing reading, revealing the heartbreaking stories of just some of the victims of the depraved gangs of men, many of whom are yet to be brought to justice for their crimes.

Victoria Agoglia (pictured), 15, died of a heroin overdose after being injected with the drug by an older man

Shabir Ahmed, a ringleader of a Rochdale child sex grooming gang who forced his victims to call him ‘Daddy’, was jailed for a total of 41 years for multiple rapes and sexual offences against children

Among the cases touched upon on in the report is the tragic death of 15-year-old Victoria Agoglia, who passed away after taking a heroin overdose in 2003.

In a letter sent to police, the girl revealed how she was sleeping with ‘people older’ than her and ‘ half of them I don’t even know their names. I am a slag.’

She went on: ‘I think it I did it just to impress the boys and they treated me like ****. All the things I lost for drugs. Boys, my family, I lost all of that.’

Vulnerable Victoria, who ran away from her terraced home 21 times in the space of two months in the lead-up to her death, had been raped and was known by her carers to be used for sex by older men in exchange for cash, alcohol and hard drugs.

In September 2003 she visited the home of a 50-year-old Asian man – Mohammed Yaqoob – who injected her with heroin. She died in hospital five days later. He was later jailed for three and half years for injecting her with a noxious substance after being cleared of manslaughter.

Maggie Oliver, a former detective who resigned from Greater Manchester Police to go public with her views on grooming gangs, revealed the letter Victoria wrote was included in a police report which was never acted on.

Ms Oliver wrote the report, which even started with a picture of Victoria and her letter in a bid to highlight her case, after launching Operation Augusta in 2004 which set out to investigate the Rochdale child abuse ring.

But shockingly the investigation was quietly shelved by police bosses while Ms Oliver was on a three-month break.

It wasn’t until eight years later that the beasts behind the operation which saw girls plied with alcohol and drugs before being used as sex slaves came to justice.

A report into Rochdale’s grooming gangs has said officials committed a ‘serious failure to protect children’. Pictured: A view of Whitworth Road in Rochdale, where one gang used a flat to abuse girls

Grooming gang members Abdul Qayyum (left) and Abdul Aziz (right) were jailed in 2012 for abusing children

While the new report focused on events taking place from a year after Victoria’s death, it concluded that lessons were not learned from her death or the resulting Operation Augusta, in which just two of almost 100 suspects were jailed.

That was despite an investigation into her death revealing 57 victims of grooming gangs, some as young as 12 years old.

One case highlighted by the report is that of Child 44, a teenage girl who was had an abortion after being abused at the age of 13 in 2009.

It was revealed that Greater Manchester Police (GMP) secretly took the foetus and performed a DNA test on it to try and link it to possible suspects.

However, when no matches came up, it was left in a freezer at Rochdale police station and was only found when it was uncovered in a ‘routine property review’.

The girl who had the abortion would only find out in 2011 that it had been taken by the police, with the moment she found out emotionally being reenacted in the BBC drama ‘Three Girls’.

She told the authors of the 173-page report that police had ‘robbed’ her of her unborn child and said it was ‘disgusting’ police had done so without her consent.

In the meantime she had continued to be abused by a grooming gang and at one point was even at risk of being taken to Pakistan by them.

A trial involving the men who abused her eventually took place in 2012, but the girl would find out in the lead-up to this that the man who got her pregnant was not to be charged with her rape.

He was instead jailed for eight years for conspiracy and trafficking for sexual exploitation, allowing him to be released four years into his sentence, reports the Guardian.

The heartbreaking stories of some of the victims of the Rochdale grooming gangs were portrayed in BBC drama ‘Three Girls’. Pictured: A promotional photo for the programme

Rochdale child abusers Jahn Shahid Ghani (left) and Mohammed Ghani (right) were both jailed last year

Insar Hussain (left) and Ali Kazmi (right) were also both jailed last year for raping children in Rochdale

The report considered claims by Maggie Oliver, former Detective Constable involved with the first large-scale investigation into grooming in Rochdale, Operation Span, launched in 2010. Pictured: Ms Oliver at her home in Cheshire

Things got worse for Child 44, as she reported being threatened by a man with a gun before the trial and being harassed and abused on the street by supporters of the men who raped and abused her.

The girl, who even bumped into her abuser in a supermarket after he was released from prison without her being informed, said police told her to just ‘lock your door’ when she asked for help about the harassment.

Another girl who also gave evidence against her abusers reported that her house was ‘trashed, with slag and grass written across the wall’, while her shed was burned down and chickens killed in a campaign of harassment.

The damning dossier also claims that no action was taken against a ‘pimp’ who got a 15-year-old girl pregnant, while another child claimed she was kept locked in cages and made to act like a dog or baby, with again, no action being taken against the men allegedly involved.

The report is the third of four written by child protection specialist Malcolm Newsam CBE and former senior police officer Gary Ridgway – and saw apologies this morning from Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, Greater Manchester Police and Rochdale Council.

The authors previously led a review of Operation Augusta, an investigation into grooming gangs in South Manchester, which was published in 2020, and the review into child safeguarding practices in Oldham, published in 2022.

It followed criticism of failings within Rochdale Council and Greater Manchester Police aired in BBC documentary, Betrayed Girls.

The report considered claims by Sara Rowbotham, co-ordinator of a young people’s Crisis Intervention Team, and Maggie Oliver, former Detective Constable involved with the first large-scale investigation into grooming in Rochdale, Operation Span, launched in 2010.

It found that the pair of ‘lone voices’ had flagged clear evidence of ‘prolific serial rape of countless children in Rochdale’ but that this was not acted upon, with the children’s unwillingness to make a formal complaint repeatedly used as an excuse for not investigating.

Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, called the report ‘a detailed and distressing account of how many young people were so seriously failed’. Pictured: Mr Burnham at the funeral of Everton chairman Bill Kenwright on December 18 last year

Mr Newsam, lead author, said: ‘GMP and Rochdale Council failed to prioritise the protection of children who were being sexually exploited by a significant number of men within the Rochdale area.

‘This review was initiated following the serious allegations made by both Maggie Oliver and Sara Rowbotham and we have found through this review their allegations to be substantiated.

‘Both GMP and Rochdale Council failed to respond appropriately to these concerns.

‘Successive police operations were launched over this period, but these were insufficiently resourced to match the scale of the widespread organised exploitation.

‘Consequently, children were left at risk and many of their abusers to this day have not been apprehended.’

Mr Newsam and Mr Ridgway said: ‘CSE continued to be treated as a low priority and under-resourced by GMP.’

By October 2012, a review group chaired by GMP identified 127 potential victims whose cases had not been acted on – a figure which later grew to 260 potential victims.

After Operation Span, three more investigations – Operation Routh, Operation Doublet and Operation Lytton – saw 30 men convicted, many of whom received lengthy sentences.

Files held by officials for 111 children revealed ‘a significant probability that 74 of these children were being sexually exploited at that time, and in 48 of those cases, there were serious failures to protect the child’, the report revealed.

A fourth review is still to take place by Mr Newsam and Mr Ridgway, which is to ‘consider current practice across Greater Manchester to address the risk of child sexual exploitation’ and recent police investigations.