Rotherham abuse trial: Corrupt detective '˜paid to protect Basharat Hussain from arrest'

One of 12 women alleged to have been victims of the gang said defendant Basharat Hussain had told her there was ‘somebody from CID he used to pay so he wouldn’t get busted’.

In a video interview played to a jury at Sheffield Crown Court, the now 30-year-old woman – known as Girl L – said Hussain had information about a police ‘safe house’ she was due to be placed in to escape him.

“He told me where I was going to go,” she said.

It came after Girl G, another alleged victim at the trial of five men and two women accused of child sexual exploitation crimes, said police and social services had been aware of her abuse in 2000 – but failed to act.

Politician ‘seen in brothel by teenage victim’

Girl L said Basharat Hussain first had sex with her when she was 15 and he was 24. The woman said he later became violent towards her – on one occasion telling her to ‘dig her own grave’.

She said he also threatened to burn her brother’s house down if she stopped seeing him and at another time held her over a hotel balcony and threatened to throw her off while spitting in her face.

The woman said: “I really thought I were going to die that night.”

She said Basharat Hussain frequently attacked her and would not allow her to wear make-up or have friends of her own.

Earlier in yesterday’s hearing, another woman told the court she had been informed by the Independent Police Complaints Commission that police officers and social workers had met in June 2000 to discuss her being ‘sexually exploited’ by Arshid Hussain and Bannaras Hussain.

The woman, who says she was made to work as a teenage prostitute on the streets of Doncaster and in a ‘brothel-type house’ in Rotherham, said no action was ever taken against the brothers.

She said seven police officers and four social workers had been at the meeting.

She said: “If everybody knew, why did nobody do anything to stop it and help us? Why did they leave it 15 years to knock on my door and say we knew what Arshid was doing but they didn’t bother doing anything?”

She said she recognised a local politician at the brothel, a man she believed was a councillor called Riaz Akhtar who was related to the Hussains. She said he had been ‘just sat drinking’ in the property.