Rochdale grooming gang ringleaders 'cannot be deported after tearing up Pakistan passports'
19 June 2025, 11:24 | Updated: 20 June 2025, 09:28
Read the latest: Rochdale gang ringleaders 'may finally be deported'
Pakistan will not take back the ringleaders of the Rochdale child grooming scandal after they renounced their citizenship and tore up their passports.
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Two of Britain’s worst grooming gang offenders, Qari Abdul Rauf and Adil Khan, remain in Britain despite losing appeals against deportation in 2018.
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 Telegraph reports.
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.
Pakistan officials told The Telegraph 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.
Ministers are now engaged in high-level talks with the Pakistani government to persuade them to drop their block on having the men returned to Pakistan.
A Pakistan government source said it was conveyed in the talks “that the UK must provide a justification for why Pakistan should accept criminals deemed dangerous to humanity, especially when they are not Pakistani citizens”.
If they had renounced their citizenship, “Pakistan has no basis to accept them,” said the source.
However, interior ministry officials said: “If the UK engages in negotiations with Pakistan on this matter, progress could be made.”
Pakistani officials are understood to want the country’s national airline to be removed from the UK safety list so it could resume flights to the UK.
While direct PIA flights to the UK were suspended, deportation was “not feasible”, a source said.
A Home Office spokesman said it would do “everything in our power” to deport foreign nationals who commit “heinous” crimes in the UK.
The Department for Transport confirmed it was still considering an application by Pakistan for its national airline to be removed from the UK safety list so it could fly to the UK.
