Rochdale horror stories: Aborted foetus in freezer, fatal injection and caged girl

The damning 173-page report in Greater Manchester Police and other authorities’ failed handling of Rochdale grooming gangs’ abuse of young girls was released today

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Rochdale: Burnham and police reflect on findings of report

A victim of Rochdale’s grooming gangs who fell pregnant saw her aborted foetus taken by police without her consent, a damning report claims.

Among the other horror stories in the review released today include a teenage girl who died from a heroin injection and another child made to act like a dog in cage. Dozens of girls were abused by gangs of mostly Asian men between 2004 and 2013 in the Greater Manchester town – with authorities failing to investigate credible evidence.

The 173-page dossier also identified 96 men are still deemed a potential risk to children despite 42 convictions made following a series of investigations, including nine during the initial scandal in 2012. At least two are still believed to be in the UK after leaving prison, despite being stripped of their British citizenship by then Home Secretary Theresa May.

The report sets out multiple failed investigations by Greater Manchester Police (GMP) and apparent local authority indifference to the plight of hundreds of youngsters, mainly white girls from poor backgrounds. Among the heartbreaking cases referenced in the report is the tragic death of 15-year-old Victoria Agoglia, who died after a heroin overdose in 2003.

In a letter sent to police, she 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.”

Victoria Agoglia died of a heroin overdose (

Image:

Manchester Evening News)

Victoria ran away from home 21 times in the space of two months in the lead-up to her death. She’d been raped and was known by her carers to be used for sex by older men in exchange for money, alcohol and drugs. In September 2003 she visited the home of 50-year-old Mohammed Yaqoob who injected her with heroin. She died in hospital five days later. Yaqoob was later jailed for three and half years for injecting her with a noxious substance, but was cleared of manslaughter.

Former detective and whistleblower Maggie Oliver quit Greater Manchester Police to go public with her views on grooming gangs. She revealed the letter Victoria wrote was included in a police report which was never acted on. Ms Oliver co-wrote the report after launching Operation Augusta in 2004 – which initially launched the long-running probe into child abuse rings in Rochdale.

But it took another eight years before any convictions came about. The report focused on events beginning a year after Victoria’s death, but concluded lessons were not learned from her death or Operation Augusta, which led to two suspects jailed of nearly 100. One case – Child 44 – saw a teen girl have an abortion after being raped at age 13 before falling pregnant in 2009.

Eight of the nine men convicted over the Rochdale grooming scandal in 2012 (

Image:

PA)

The report said GMP secretly took the foetus and performed a DNA test to try and link it to potential suspects. When none were found, the foetus was left in a freezer and only found due to a “routine property review”. The victim only discovered the foetus had been taken in 2011. She told the report’s authors that cops “robbed” her of her unborn child and labelled their actions as “disgusting”.

A trial involving the men who abused her took place in 2012, and in the lead up she found out the man who got her pregnant would not be charged with rape. He was jailed for eight years for conspiracy and trafficking for sexual exploitation, allowing him to be released four years into his sentence, reports the Guardian.

Child 44 reported being threatened by a man with a gun before the trial and said she was harassed and abused on the street by supporters of her abuser. She later bumped into him in the supermarket after his release from prison and police told her to just “lock your door” when she asked for help. Another child claimed she was locked in cages and made to act like a dog or a baby, but no action was taken against the men allegedly involved.