Rochdale grooming gang: The girl kept in a cage and made to act like a dog, a 15-year-old raped and killed with heroin injection from an abuser and an aborted foetus kept in a freezer by police
January 16, 2024 · By MATTHEW LODGE and JAMES TOZER for www.dailymail.co.uk
Victoria Agoglia (pictured), 15, died of a heroin overdose after being injected with the drug by an older man
Rochdale grooming gang: The girl kept in a cage and made to act like a dog, a 15-year-old raped and killed with heroin injection from an abuser and an aborted foetus kept in a freezer by police
The damning dossier, which has identified 96 men who are still deemed a potential risk to children, has sparked calls from whistleblowers that there is ‘categorically’ still grooming taking place in the town.
It is not the first official report into child sex exploitation in Rochdale – a report in 2013 found that hundreds of young girls were allowed to fall into the hands of Asian grooming gangs because police and social workers may have been scared of seeming racist. They refused to believe that race was an issue even though dozens of young, white girls were being specifically targeted and groomed for sex by older Pakistani men.
Whistleblower Sara Rowbotham appeared on the verge of tears as she greeted her vindication after years of being ‘scapegoated’. The former sexual health worker – who was played by Maxine Peake in the BBC drama about the scandal, Three Girls – was later appointed MBE for services to young people after an online petition attracted more than 300,000 signatures.
‘How many more times will it take a drama or documentary and the ensuing public outcry to call people and organisations to account?’ she asked. ‘We were blamed, and they said it was my fault.’
Today’s report makes for distressing reading, revealing the heartbreaking stories of just some of the victims of the depraved gangs of men, many of whom are yet to be brought to justice for their crimes.
It also emerged today that:
Among the cases touched upon on in the report is the tragic death of 15-year-old Victoria Agoglia, who passed away after taking a heroin overdose in 2003.
In a letter sent to police, the girl 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.’
Vulnerable Victoria, who ran away from her terraced home 21 times in the space of two months in the lead-up to her death, had been raped and was known by her carers to be used for sex by older men in exchange for cash, alcohol and hard drugs.
In September 2003 she visited the home of a 50-year-old Asian man – Mohammed Yaqoob – who injected her with heroin. She died in hospital five days later. He was later jailed for three and half years for injecting her with a noxious substance after being cleared of manslaughter.
Maggie Oliver, a former detective who resigned from Greater Manchester Police to go public with her views on grooming gangs, revealed the letter Victoria wrote was included in a police report which was never acted on.
Ms Oliver wrote the report, which even started with a picture of Victoria and her letter in a bid to highlight her case, after launching Operation Augusta in 2004 which set out to investigate the Rochdale child abuse ring.
But shockingly the investigation was quietly shelved by police bosses while Ms Oliver was on a three-month break.
It wasn’t until eight years later that the beasts behind the operation which saw girls plied with alcohol and drugs before being used as sex slaves came to justice.
Ms Rowbotham said she and her team had been accused of not referring abused children to police, which the report said was a ‘gross misrepresentation’.
‘Children were being raped every day,’ she said. ‘Both the police and Rochdale children services told me and kept telling me, it was nothing to do with them.
‘Everything being done now, should have been done then. All it would have taken is the right people actually giving a damn.’
Ms Rowbotham said her team were told to ‘draw a line under’ their concerns after the original Rochdale grooming gang was jailed in 2012.
‘That’s disgusting,’ she said. ‘We couldn’t believe no-one wanted to protect the young people or track down or prosecute the perpetrators. This made me ill.’
Slamming the former or current public servants who refused to respond to the report authors’ request to explain their actions, she said: ‘Shame on you.’
‘Clearly it was easier to discredit, diminish and dismiss the fact that children were being manipulated, poisoned and raped,’ she added.
After losing her job she became a Labour councillor in Rochdale.
While the new report focused on events taking place from a year after Victoria’s death, it concluded that lessons were not learned from her death or the resulting Operation Augusta, in which just two of almost 100 suspects were jailed.
That was despite an investigation into her death revealing 57 victims of grooming gangs, some as young as 12 years old.
One case highlighted by the report is that of Child 44, a teenage girl who had an abortion after being abused at the age of 13 in 2009.
It was revealed that Greater Manchester Police (GMP) secretly took the foetus and performed a DNA test on it to try and link it to possible suspects.
However, when no matches came up, it was left in a freezer at Rochdale police station and was only found when it was uncovered in a ‘routine property review’.
The girl who had the abortion would only find out in 2011 that it had been taken by the police, with the moment she found out emotionally being reenacted in the BBC drama ‘Three Girls’.
She told the authors of the 173-page report that police had ‘robbed’ her of her unborn child and said it was ‘disgusting’ police had done so without her consent.
In the meantime she had continued to be abused by a grooming gang and at one point was even at risk of being taken to Pakistan by them.
A trial involving the men who abused her eventually took place in 2012, but the girl would find out in the lead-up to this that the man who got her pregnant was not to be charged with her rape.
He was instead jailed for eight years for conspiracy and trafficking for sexual exploitation, allowing him to be released four years into his sentence, reports the Guardian.
