A man who groomed, then raped, a thirteen-year-old girl, getting her pregnant, then setting her house on fire with her mother and sister inside–killing them–is to be released after serving nineteen years in prison.
This case marked one of the most harrowing stories from Telford’s grooming gang scandal.
Azhar Ali Mehmood, a taxi driver, told police that he had removed his 16-month-old daughter, Tasnim, out of the house where he had doused petrol and set alight, killing Tasnim’s teenage mother, her sister, and mother.
According to The Sun:
At the time of the murders in 2000, local newspapers dubbed him a “house blaze killer” and, “The county’s worst ever murderer” and he was jailed for life.
Now, 19 years on, Azhar Ali Mehmood is eligible for release – and Tasnim has been asked to bring her opinion to the parole board.
Fired up with questions about why her father would kill her mum, Tasnim goes in search of answers in a three-part BBC documentary called Why Dad Killed Mum: My Family’s Secret, and discovers her mum may have been groomed and raped by her evil father.
Tasnim’s mother, Lucy Lowe, who had been groomed by Mehmood from the age of thirteen, found out she was pregnant at fourteen.
At the beginning of Mehmood’s relationship with Lucy, Mehmood was twenty-four.
Lucy was simply one of the many victims from the Telford grooming gang scandal where hundreds of girls were lulled into a false sense of security, plied with drugs and alcohol, raped, sold, trafficked, sometimes impregnated, and sometimes even killed.
The authorities worked to help keep the lid on the extent of these crimes reaching the public–given the politically incorrect nature of the bulk of the perpetrators.
The Sun continues:
Survivors explained how the abuse worked; the groomers were nice to them at first – buying them takeaways or presents – before taking them to The Wrekin, a famous beauty spot on the outskirts of Telford to be raped, or to people’s houses and passed around to friends.
McKelvie (an investigative journalist, who exposed the Telford grooming gan scandal) kept hearing about one street where there was a row of seven or eight houses, “where there was pretty much a rapist in every house”.
She also heard how underage girls were taken to rooms above takeaways to be assaulted and raped with the perpetrators selling them and making thousands of pounds.
Nineteen years later, Mehmood is up for parole–in spite of the severity of his crimes–to which his daughter, Tasnim, has decried as insufficient.
The Telford grooming gang scandal was one of many similar scandals to have rocked–and continue to rock–the UK, but is pitifully underreported as the vast majority of the perpetrators aren’t of British descent.
Furthermore, The BBC took over 24 hours to report on the Telford scandal after the news had broken.
Many have viewed the extent of the crimes committed against primarily white British girls as a form of conquest.
In other scandals, such as Rotherham, the authorities worked to cover up the crimes.
In one such case, a whistleblower was sent on a diversity course for drawing attention to the rapes within Rotherham Council’s purview.
