‘The day I was raped changed me as a person’, read the impact statement of a 15-year-old girl in Warwickshire Crown Court this Monday. ‘Every time I go out I don’t feel safe.’
The teenager was attacked back in May in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. Her rapists were two 17-year-old Afghan asylum seekers. Having been out in town, the girl and her friends got chatting to Jan Jahanzeb and Israr Niazal. Jahanzeb and Niazal then coerced her to ‘come for a walk’ with them, separating her from her friends. Grainy CCTV footage shows the pair forcibly marching the teen to a ‘den-type area’ at Newbold Comyn, where they went on to rape her, forcing her to perform oral sex on both of them. When the victim tried to scream for help, they covered her mouth.
The schoolgirl herself also filmed part of the attack. One of the rapists’ own lawyers described the footage as ‘so horrific’ that it would ‘cause riots’ if it were to ever be seen by the public.
Both defendants pleaded guilty to the rape during an October hearing. Deportation papers have been served to Jahanzeb, as well as a sentence of 10 years and eight months, to be served partially in a young-offenders institution. Niazal has also been recommended for deportation, and sentenced to nine years and 10 months. Additionally, the pair have been placed on the Sex Offenders Register for life and given an indefinite restraining order.
‘Watching [my family] feeling crushed as they believe they should have been there or done something is particularly painful for me’, the victim’s impact statement said, ‘even though I know they couldn’t have done anything to stop what happened’. A separate impact statement, written by the teenage girl’s mother, read: ‘We have watched our vibrant, happy and confident daughter shrink down and suffer with anxiety so bad, she is often physically sick… Something broke in all of us that day.’
While it clearly goes without saying that the victim and her family were powerless to ‘stop what happened’, this was, let’s be frank, an entirely preventable tragedy. After all, neither Jahanzeb nor Niazal should ever have been in Britain in the first place.
Both came here via the English Channel. While Niazal arrived in November 2024, Jahanzeb arrived in January of this year, following three failed crossings. Two of his previous trips ended when his boat was intercepted by French police. On his fourth try, he was successful. With borders as porous as Britain’s, his arrival was grimly inevitable.
The Warwickshire rape case is part of an all too familiar pattern involving newly arrived small-boats migrants. This summer, Ethiopian national Hatush Kebatu arrived in the UK after travelling through Italy and France. He was here just eight days before he sexually assaulted a woman and a 14-year-old girl in Epping in July.
In the same month, Afghan asylum seekers Ahmad Mulakhil and Mohammad Kabir together abducted, strangled and raped a 12-year-old in Nuneaton – a town just 20 miles or so from Leamington Spa.
We have heard this story and others like it time and again in recent years. People with no right to be in Britain, who claim to be fleeing persecution, are seemingly free to commit heinous crimes against the most vulnerable in our society.
Of course, officialdom doesn’t see it this way. In the warped minds of Britain’s political elites, it is the new arrivals who are the truly ‘vulnerable’ ones. Never mind that they are unvetted and their intentions unknown. In many cases, small-boats migrants are fleeing criminal charges, rather than seeking refuge from persecution. Yet it seems no matter how many times British citizens – including children – are victimised, nothing much ever changes. Those who arrive in Britain illegally are taken in by the Home Office and then dispersed around the country. Once on British soil, they are almost never detained or ejected. Only in the rarest of circumstances is there any penalty of any kind for arriving in the UK illegally.
The political class is presiding over a perverse and utterly corrupted system – one that cares only about the comfort of illegal migrants from overseas, and cares literally nothing for the safety of ordinary British women and children. How many more girls will be sacrificed before our broken borders are fixed?
Georgina Mumford is an editorial assistant at spiked.
