Rochdale grooming gang leaders may finally be deported to Pakistan 'if the UK restores direct flights'
20 June 2025, 09:14
Officials in Pakistan want direct flights to the UK to resume as part of a 'deal' to get two Rochdale grooming gang ringleaders deported.
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Ministers have been negotiating to try and have Qari Abdul Rauf and Adil Khan deported. Their deportation is currently blocked by Pakistan because the men renounced their citizenship and tore up their passports.
A judge ordered both men to be deported to Pakistan nearly a decade ago but both men renounced their Pakistani citizenship days before a court appeal against the Home Office order.
They managed to thwart deportation efforts by saying they would be made ‘stateless’ if they were sent back to Pakistan.
Pakistan has refused to take them. An official has said it would be “extremely difficult” to take back such dangerous criminals and that there was “no basis to accept them” if they had renounced their citizenship.
But a Pakistani foreign office official has confirmed the country could change its stance if Britain dropped its ban on Pakistani airlines operating direct flights to the UK.
However officials in the UK say the process of resuming flights is an 'independent' one and the deportation row will have no bearing on the decision.
Britain banned all Pakistani airlines from operating flights in and out of the UK in 2021 due to safety concerns after it emerged dozens of Pakistani pilots were operating with fake licences.
Pakistan has applied to be removed from the UK Air Safety list, a list of countries whose air carriers are banned from operating direct flights to and from the UK.
The application is still being determined by the Department for Transport, supported by the UK Civil Aviation Authority.
The department said that the process was “technical and independent” to negotiations over the deportation.
An official told The Times: “This complex case involves several legal challenges, and we are currently in discussions with UK authorities, although no significant progress has been made yet. Concurrently, technical discussions regarding the resumption of PIA flights to the UK are also under way.”
Khan, 54, and Rauf, 55, were jailed in 2012 for leading a nine-strong gang of Asian men who sexually assaulted 47 girls, some as young as 12, after plying them with drink and drugs.
Khan, who fathered the child of a 13-year-old grooming victim, was jailed for eight years. Rauf was jailed for six years. They are both still living in Rochdale.
But the men have frustrated deportation efforts by exploiting the courts and citizenship rules.
The Home Office won a court of appeal ruling to deport them and a third member of the gang, Abdul Aziz in 2018, after stripping them of British citizenship.
However Rauf and Khan renounced their Pakistani citizenship to thwart their deportation, with Aziz tearing up his passport before the 2018 ruling.
The government was forced to let him stay because he could not be made stateless under international law.
