Rape allegations made by a teenager who accuses 13 men and a 17-year-old boy of sexually abusing her contain “very many flaws”, a court has heard.
The alleged victim, now 18, who cannot be named, claims she was aged just 13 and 14 when she was raped by the Asian males in various locations across Keighley, West Yorkshire, including in parks, the back of a library and a leisure centre, and in a disused underground car park.
On one afternoon in 2012, five different men took it in turns to rape her in broad daylight in the street, the jury heard at Bradford crown court.
On Thursday barristers for four defendants accused the young woman of giving inconsistent and implausible evidence. They claimed the teenager, who is white, changed her story about the alleged gang attack after being given a book by social workers about a white girl groomed for sex by older Asian men.
Katherine Pierpoint, defending Saqib Younis, 29, who is charged with raping the teenager twice, said that shortly after being taken into care in June 2012, the alleged victim was given a book called The End of My World: The Shocking True Story of a Young Girl Forced to Become a Sex Slave.
The barrister told the court that the teenager did not mention gang rape at all during her first few police interviews, and alleged she then appeared to embellish her story after being given the book by a youth project called Hand to Hand.
When she first made the claims about an alleged gang rape in Dalton Lane in Keighley, she maintained that the men raped her without pulling her skinny jeans down, the court heard. After reading the book she changed her story to say they pulled “one leg out”, the jury was told.
A near identical account of rape is given in the book, said Pierpoint, telling the court that the author recalled a man called Tariq told her to “take a leg out – it saves time and they can just get stuck in”.
In a video interview shown to the jury, the complainant said the men each forced her to give them oral sex on Dalton Lane and then raped her on a concrete step.
It was not a credible account, claimed Ian Brook, defending Nazir Khan, 23, who denies three counts of rape.
Brook told the court the girl failed to identify Khan in a police line-up. And, knowing him just by the nickname “Khany”, told police she thought his real name was actually “Quasim Ali”. This confusion was “the elephant in the court room”, Brook said, calling the prosecution case against his client a “damp squib”.
Zarif Khan, representing Nazir Khan’s brother Faisal Khan, 27, one of the other Dalton Lane defendants, told the court that the complainant had given police a wrong description of his client, saying Faisal had a scar above his ear, which he does not have, and failed to mention his prominent gold teeth.
Geraldine Kelly, representing Hussain Sardar, 19, accused of raping the alleged victim twice on Dalton Lane when he was 14 or 15, told the court the prosecution contained “very many flaws”. She said her client had consistently denied any sexual contact with the complainant and claimed he was so naive that he did not know the proper name for genitals, asking police in his interview: “Vagina? Who’s she?”
The defendants deny a total of 28 charges between them. The case continues.
