A grooming gang suspect who had escaped investigation because of a string of police failings went on to attempt to murder his wife, a Guardian investigation can reveal.
The man, named only as Offender J in paperwork seen by the Guardian, is alleged to have taken part in the gang–rape of 12-year-old Samantha Walker-Roberts in Oldham, Greater Manchester, in 2006.
Offender J tried to kill his wife in 2009. Two years earlier, he had been named by the ringleader, Shakil Chowdhury, as an alleged accomplice in Walker-Roberts’s abuse but Greater Manchester police failed to follow up on this and closed the case.
Dozens of items recovered from Chowdhury’s home, where Walker-Roberts says she was raped for hours by five men, were destroyed by officers or returned to Chowdhury. She was trafficked around the town to be abused by several groups of men after being kidnapped from a police station where she had tried to report an earlier assault.
The Guardian understands that Offender J is now unlikely to face charges in relation to Walker-Roberts’s ordeal because the surviving forensic evidence does not link him to her abuse. Chowdhury, jailed for six years in 2007, remains the only man to be convicted in the case, but Walker-Roberts was told last month that officers were pursuing two outstanding suspects.
Sarwar Ali absconded after being charged with rape and has never been traced. Police are trying to identify a third man forensically linked to the case. The Guardian understands he appears not to have come to police attention before.
Walker-Roberts said: “All my life, I’ve been told I need to move on but how can I, when I don’t have the answers? Most people get closure when they get a sentence but I’ll never be at that stage, so for me the answers are closure.”
She added that she “gave up hope a long time ago” that all of the men involved in her abuse would be brought to justice but feared they had attacked other victims. “I’m praying that others will come forward, I want others to get justice in one form or another,” she said.
An internal police inquiry concluded in 2014 that Offender J’s wife may have been spared his attack if forensic inquiries had been adequately conducted in Walker-Roberts’s case.
A review of the remaining forensic evidence during this investigation linked two other girls to Chowdhury’s property. They were interviewed and said they’d had sex with Chowdhury at his home when they were 16 but appear not to have made criminal complaints.
A safeguarding review commissioned by Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, said in 2022 it had been unable to assess the quality of the inquiries made after the original forensic submissions.
It added that Offender J’s wife told police in 2011 that he had admitted to her that he had raped a 12-year-old. She said Offender J had kept newspaper clippings relating to Chowdhury’s court case and subsequent conviction.
The information was passed to Operation Messenger, a now defunct multi-agency taskforce designed to combat child sexual exploitation in Oldham, but again was not acted on. The safeguarding review said this was a “serious failure”.
In 2007, 22 items of evidence from Chowdhury’s home, including bedding and a towel, were returned to him via his solicitor, despite possible relevance to outstanding suspects. The following year, officers destroyed a further 24 items, including material from Chowdhury’s car and the contents of his bin.
When challenged by Walker-Roberts eight years later, the force was unable to provide a “forensic strategy” relating to her case. Walker-Roberts said she was asked to pick out Offender J at a police ID parade in 2014 as part of a new investigation, but was unable to identify him.
Failings in Oldham have been central to the establishment of a national inquiry into grooming gangs, which will be chaired by the former children’s commissioner Anne Longfield when it begins in March.
The government initially resisted calls for a national inquiry – including those from the owner of X, Elon Musk – instead funding a local investigation in Oldham chaired by a former judge, Tom Crowther, who had led a similar inquiry in Telford, Shropshire.
However, an audit by the Whitehall troubleshooter Louise Casey suggested a national inquiry was needed. Crowther has now been stood down and the Oldham investigation will be absorbed into the wider inquiry.
The national inquiry, which will look at abuse in England and Wales, has been mired in controversy since it was announced in June.
In October, four women quit a survivor advisory panel, saying they felt the government was manipulating them to expand the scope of the inquiry beyond street-based grooming gangs.
They called for the resignation of the safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, but five others, including Walker-Roberts, wrote to the prime minister, Keir Starmer, to support her.
Longfield was selected to chair the investigation after the two previous frontrunners, a former police officer Jim Gamble, and a former social worker, Annie Hudson, withdrew.
A spokesperson for Greater Manchester police said that Walker-Roberts had “suffered horrific abuse which was compounded by appalling failures by the authorities that should’ve protected her at that time”, and that she had received an apology in 2022.
“The way Samantha was treated by police was far from the standard survivors can expect from the GMP of today. Since one man was convicted of abusing Samantha we have two further suspects we are determined to bring to court to face charges. One remains charged and remains outstanding – efforts to locate him will not stop until he is found. There is a further suspect forensically linked to the investigation whose identity we are trying to establish.”
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
