A corrupt detective tipped off one of the Rotherham grooming gang about potential arrests, a court has heard. One of the 12 complainants involved in the grooming trial at Sheffield crown court said her abuser was a drug dealer who used to stash about £40,000 in shoeboxes in his car.
The woman, now 30, said Basharat Hussain, one of the seven defendants in the trial, used to meet the officer in a supermarket car park for tipoffs, including inside information about attempts to arrest him. She said she also believed that the officer passed on information to Hussain about a safe house she was planning to move to in order to escape his physical abuse.
“He [Hussain] said he’d always got somebody in CID to tell him these sorts of things and he used to pay this person in CID money … He’d always tell him when he were going to get busted.”
Referring to the detective, she said: “I met this person from about being 16 to 18 years old at Aldi car park. He would never get in the car with me and Bash. Bash used to get in his car.”
The woman, known as Girl L, said Hussain carried about £40,000 in shoeboxes in his car and kept about £80,000 in the room of another teenage girl he was said to be abusing. “He was making so much profit from drugs,” she said. She said on another occasion, she had seen about £100,000 in cash in a flat Hussain lived in – money she said he told her he had made from selling cars.
The prosecution says that Girl L was subjected to years of mental and physical cruelty, that she was assaulted regularly and lived in fear that she or her brother would be seriously harmed or killed. Hussain denies all 15 charges against him, four of which are related to Girl L and which include indecent assault, threatening to kill her brother, and assault causing actual bodily harm.
In video interviews played to the jury, the woman said a potential move to a safe house for her family fell through after Hussain phoned her with details about her conversations with police. “Bash phoned me and told me this is what was happening and he actually told me where I were going,” she said, adding that she “obviously” could no longer move there.
The woman said Hussain had threatened to burn down her brother’s house and had sent her text messages saying he was going to shoot her when she attempted to stop their contact. She said Hussain had gone on the run to Pakistan when he was wanted by the police and he had attempted to persuade her to go with him.
The trial continues.
