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Man suspected of rape on a flight to London arrested
at Heathrow airport
By Doug Cunningham
File Photo by Andy Rain/EPA-EFE
Feb. 9 (UPI) -- A man suspected of raping a woman on a flight from New Jersey to London was arrested at Heathrow Airport.
Metropolitan police said Wednesday that the 40-year-old man was released "under investigation" after his arrest.
The 40-year-old British woman told the United Airlines staff she was attacked on the plane on Jan. 31 in business class. Staff alerted police.
"Officers met the aircraft on arrival and arrested a 40-year-old man on suspicion of rape," police said in a statement, "The complainant, a 40-year-old woman, is being supported by specialist officers and inquiries are ongoing."
United Airlines told CNN that as soon as they became aware of the allegations the plane's crew called ahead to notify local authorities. The airline said it will cooperate with law enforcement on any investigation.
The alleged rape happened on a flight from Newark, N.J., to London while other passengers were asleep, according to Sky News.
Scotland Yard said investigators boarded the jet to arrest the suspect at 6:30 a.m. Jan. 31.
Officers searched the luxury cabin where the attack allegedly happened, scanned for fingerprints, took DNA samples and took a mugshot of the suspect before releasing the suspect.
Camilla and May back NHS campaign to help victims
and survivors of abuse
It is hoped campaign will encourage those affected by sexual and domestic abuse
to visit a referral centre
Jamie Grierson
Mon 7 Feb 2022 00.01 GMT
Theresa May and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall are among figures backing a campaign to encourage survivors of sexual and domestic abuse to come forward for help through the NHS.
The campaign, backed by a £20m boost to specialist services, comes on the first day of Sexual Abuse and Sexual Violence Awareness Week.
NHS England (NHSE) said the campaign was intended to highlight the support offered at dozens of sexual assault referral centres (SARCs) in England. The service is also creating two new clinical lead roles for domestic violence and sexual assault.
NHSE said the 24-hour centres offered confidential specialist, practical, medical and emotional support to anyone who has been raped, sexually assaulted or abused, no matter when it happened.
Excellent! I take back all those nasty things I said about Theresa May, well, most of them.
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Adrift after enslavement, Yazidi teen says she can’t go home
By SAMYA KULLAB
today
BARZAN, Syria (AP) — Roza Barakat’s tormentors have been defeated, but the horrors she endured still hold her captive.
She was 11 years old when she was captured and enslaved by the Islamic State group, along with thousands of other Yazidi women and girls taken when the militants overran northern Iraq in their brutal 2014 campaign.
Torn from her family in the town of Sinjar, the enclave of the ancient religious Yazidi minority, she was taken to Syria, sold multiple times and repeatedly raped. She bore a child, a boy she has since lost. Now, at 18, she speaks little of her native Kurdish dialect, Kurmanji.
With the defeat of IS in 2019, Barakat slipped into the shadows, opting to hide in the turmoil that followed the worst of the battles. As IS fighters were arrested, their wives and children were packed into detention camps. Barakat was free, but she couldn’t go home.
“I don’t know how I’ll face my community,” she told The Associated Press, speaking in Arabic, as she nervously played with the ends of her long dark braid, the red polish on her dainty fingers fading.
For years, her IS captors told her she would never be accepted if she returned. “I believed them,” she said.
Barakat’s tale, corroborated by Yazidi and Syrian Kurdish officials, is a window into the complicated realities faced by many Yazidi women who came of age under the brutal rule of IS. Traumatized and lost, many struggle to come to terms with the past, while the Yazidi community is at odds over how to accept them.
“What do you expect from a child who was raped at 12, gave birth at 13?” said Faruk Tuzu, co-chair of Yazidi House, an umbrella of Yazidi organizations in northeastern Syria. “After so much shock and abuse they don’t believe in anything anymore, they don’t belong anywhere.”
The AP does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission.
Barakat spoke to the AP from a safe house run by Tuzu’s group just a few days after the leader of the Islamic State group, believed to have played a key role in the enslavement of Yazidi women, was killed in a U.S. raid in northwestern Syria.
She shrugged off the news, saying it doesn’t make a difference.
IS first sold Barakat to an Iraqi from Tal Afar, a man older than her father. She shudders as she recounts how he “made me call his wife ‘mother.’” After a few months she was sold to another man.
Eventually, her IS captors gave her a choice: Convert to Islam and marry an IS fighter, or be sold again. She converted, she says, to avoid being sold. She married a Lebanese they chose for her, a man who ferried food and equipment for IS fighters.
“He was better than most,” she said. At 13, she gave birth to a son, Hoodh. At the peak of the militants’ self-proclaimed “caliphate,” they lived in the city of Raqqa, the IS capital.
Once, she begged her husband to find out what happened to her older sisters who had been taken just like her. She had lost hope that her parents were still alive.
Some weeks later, he told her he found one of her sisters, holding up a photo of a woman in Raqqa’s slave market where Yazidi girls were sold.
“How different she looks,” Barakat remembers thinking.
Continuous rape and slavery will do that!
By early 2019 as IS rule was crumbling, Barakat fled with her husband first to the eastern Syrian city of Deir el-Zour, and then to the town of Baghouz, which became IS’s last stand. As U.S.-backed Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces surrounded Baghouz, a safe passage was offered to women and children.
At this point, Barakat could have stepped forward and identified herself as a Yazidi and sought safety. But instead, she clutched Hoodh in her arms and walked out of the town with other IS wives.
Today, over 2,800 Yazidi women and children are still missing, said Tuzu. Some have cut ties and are building new lives outside the community, believing that if they return, they’d be killed. Others fear being separated from their children, fathered by IS members.
Iraq’s Yazidi community has forced women returning to Sinjar to give up their children as a condition to return. Many were told their children would be adopted by Syrian Kurdish families but dozens have ended up in an orphanage in northeastern Syria.
The fate of the children has been at the center of an ongoing debate within the Yazidi community. In 2019, the Yazidi Spiritual Council, the highest authority among Yazidis, called on members to accept all Yazidi survivors of IS atrocities. Days later, the council clarified the decision excluded children born of IS rape.
“This is our mistake, and we recognize that — we didn’t allow the children to stay with their mothers,” said Tuzu.
He confirmed that some Yazidi women are still at al-Hol camp, which holds tens of thousands of women and children, mostly wives, widows and children of IS members.
Many of the missing Yazidis scattered across Syria and Turkey, others live clandestine lives in the Syrian city of Aleppo and in Deir El-Zour. Tuzu expects the majority may have gone to the rebel province of Idlib, where al-Qaida is dominant but where IS also maintains a presence.
After walking out of Baghouz with other IS women in March 2019, Barakat slipped away to a nearby village rather than end up in a camp. With the help of IS sympathizers, she took a smuggling route and ended up in Idlib, in northwesten Syria, in a home for IS widows. Her husband was killed in Baghouz.
Here, Barakat’s story diverges from what she told officials. Initially, she told them she had left her son behind in Idlib to find work elsewhere. She told the AP that Hoodh died after an airstrike in Idlib.
When pressed to clarify, she said: “It’s hard. I don’t want to talk about it.”
With the help of a smuggler, she made her way to Deir el-Zour and eventually found work at a clothing market, saving up for a new life in Turkey.
She still dreamed of making it to Turkey when Kurdish internal security forces caught her last month, waiting in a house in the town of al-Tweinah to be taken by smugglers across the Syria-Turkey border.
She was held and interrogated for days.
“I did everything to hide that I was Yazidi,” she said. She told the investigators she was from Deir el-Zour, and was hoping to get medical treatment in Turkey, but they didn’t buy it.
One held up an old photo found on her mobile phone — a young Yazidi woman in an IS slave market — and asked her to explain.
“The words just came out: ‘That is my sister,’” Barakat said.
Once the truth was out, Barakat was taken to a safe house in the village of Barzan, in Syria’s Hassakeh province, where the Yazidi community welcomed her.
“I was in shock to hear their kind words, and to be welcomed the way I was,” she said.
She isn’t ready to go back to Sinjar just yet. Her entire family was either killed or is still unaccounted for.
What is there to go back to, she wonders. “I need time, for myself.”
I wonder, when and if she does return to Sinjar, that she will be pleasantly surprised at the reception, and at the number of friends and family who have suffered as she has and are still alive?
‘Paedophile’ Lord Ahmed of Rotherham Jailed
for Sex Crimes Against Children
PETER CADDLE
6 Feb 2022198
Nazir Ahmed, also known as Lord Ahmed of Rotherham, has been jailed for the attempted rape of a young girl, as well as for twice sodomizing a boy under 11 years of age.
Ahmed had previously said that the events in question — which occurred when he was a teen — were a “malicious fiction”, but was subsequently convicted of the offences in question earlier this year.
According to a report by the BBC, the former peer of the left-wing Labour Party will now be put behind bars after being sentenced to five years and six months in prison by Mr Justice Lavender on Friday at the Sheffield Crown Court.
Justice Lavender said that the offences committed by Ahmed were “so serious that only a custodial sentence can be justified”, but noted that the leftist politician was a “child” at the time of the offences.
The judge also emphasised the “profound and lifelong effects” the ex-Labour peer’s crimes had on his young victims when handing down the sentence.
The female victim said of Ahmed: “He is a paedophile who has no personal shame. But in the end, all tyrants fall,” she said.
Two of the Pakistani-born peer’s older brothers — Mohammed Farouq, 71, and Mohammed Tariq, 65– were also facing the possibility of charges in relation to Ahmed’s male victim but had been deemed fit not to stand trial and therefore will face no punishment.
Subsequent to the former Labour peer’s conviction, calls emerged for Lord Ahmed to have his title stripped from him.
“There is no getting away from the fact that this paedophile is in possession of a peerage and this is absolutely and categorically unacceptable,” said Conservative MP Alexander Stafford, who launched a petition calling for the honour to be taken from the convicted criminal. “He should be stripped of this immediately.”
Meanwhile, Ahmed’s male victim, known only as Mr B, has also reportedly called for Ahmed to be stripped of his peerage.
“That title is bestowed upon people that have got some honour, some dignity, and he’s got none of that,” The Guardian reports Mr B as saying.
“I’m demanding the government take that peerage away from him,” he continued.
Mother of baby raped by Royal Navy officer says the
'manipulative, predatory' paedophile should never be released
after he offended again just months after being let out of jail
By EMER SCULLY FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 10:15 EST, 11 February 2022 |
The mother of a baby who was raped by a 'manipulative and conniving, predatory paedophile' has said he should have been jailed for life after he offended again within months of being released from prison.
Former Royal Navy Chief Petty Officer Geoffrey Rooney was jailed for 14 years in 2015 for a series of sickening sexual offences against children, including babies.
Rooney, 46, was released from prison in January 2021 after serving half that sentence, but Bradford Crown Court heard how he was caught in a police sting operation later that year.
A judge described how the former senior NCO engaged in 'disgusting' online chats with two undercover police officers during which he arranged to engage in sexual activity with their fictional children and sent them vile photographs and videos of abuse.
On Friday, Judge David Hatton QC jailed Rooney for eight years with an extended licence of six years due to the danger he poses, especially to small children.
The court heard he has already been recalled to serve the full 14 years sentence for his previous offending, imposed by Plymouth Crown Court in 2015.
Judge Hatton explained that legislation which imposed an automatic life sentence for a second 'listed' offence only applied if he intended to pass a sentence in excess of 10 years for the new offences.
The judge said the images sent to the officers by Rooney were 'grotesque and defy description'.
The mother of two of his original victims was in court to hear Rooney being jailed again. Speaking outside court, she said the law should be changed to make sure repeat offenders are jailed for life and she described Friday's sentence as 'absolutely outrageous'.
The woman said: 'I'd like him to have a life sentence because he's such a danger to the public. I think he should never come out of prison again.' She said: 'This allows him to be out at some point which I think is terrifying.'
He will be out by at least age 61. Still lots of years to destroy lots of children. Why couldn't the judge have added 2 more years to his sentence and then he would be required to be incarcerated for life. There is no reason to have any sign of mercy on a monster like this.
The mother, who cannot be identified, said: 'He's not learnt anything from his time inside. He's not rehabilitated. He's just come out and done exactly what he wanted to do, which is to abuse other children.
'He is incredibly dangerous. He has an intrinsic compulsion to attack children. He is just an incredibly dangerous man.'
The woman said her family has been 'devastated' by what Rooney did to her children and 'the deep-rooted pain and suffering we experienced at the hands of that evil man'.
She said: 'He a manipulative and conniving predatory paedophile whose only thoughts are for himself and his sick perversions.
'Despite being assessed as safe for release on licence, he was clearly unable to control his urges and offended again with six months.
'He is a danger to all children and should be locked up for the public's safety. He is a devious manipulative rapist who preyed on very young children.'
Rooney, of Moore Avenue, Bradford, has previously admitted arranging or facilitating the commission of a child sex offence and breaching the terms of a sexual harm prevention order as well as charges relating to sending indecent images of children.
The paedophile was once well-respected in the Navy and had postings to Whitehall in 2009 and 2010 which saw him work alongside come of Britain's top commanders.
But between late 2013 and early 2014 he carried out a series of sex attacks on children, some of which he photographed on his mobile phone.
Rooney was tracked down after a woman called police and said she had found indecent images of children which had been emailed to her husband.
Rooney's emails which contained indecent images of children also had requests for the man to allow his own children to be sexually abused.
Police found Rooney had sent pictures to another paedophile showing him abusing a sleeping child.
Rooney admitted raping a girl under 13, sexually assaulting another young girl, taking indecent photos of kids, sexually assaulting a boy and making, possessing and distributing child porn images.
OMG - Can we send him to the Russian gulag? I think the sentence should be appealed so that this monster is never allowed to walk free again.
Sentencing him at Plymouth Crown Court in 2015, Judge Paul Darlow described him as a 'casual, callous predatory paedophile'.
A mother whose children were just a baby and toddler at the time of the offences previously said Rooney's crimes had hugely damaged her and children's lives.
She said: 'When the police told me, I started shaking uncontrollably. They came around five days later and showed us the pictures. He told the police they were my children. But we still needed to look at the pictures to identify them.
'It was just disgusting. I felt so physically sick. I just broke down and could not carry on. The image was imprinted on my mind.'
The mother added: 'The images will stay with us for the rest of our lives. They have caused a lot of trauma. That feeling of violation is never going to go away.
'(My children) had to be taken away to be medically examined. They had to have a lot of tests. Every time I took them out they were really nervous - we had to go to a few different clinics.
'I could not face it. One of my daughters had a mental health assessment and has needed speech therapy and I have had to receive counselling.'
Rooney was arrested after an image of him abusing the woman's baby was found on his mobile phone.
The mother expressed her anger at Rooney's sentence, which means he will be freed in just six years.
Hold on here! He has to serve out the remainder of his previous sentence - so about 6 years, but then what happens to the new 8 year sentence? Is it to run concurrently? How can that be? They are two completely different cases.
If this is correct, this sentence must be appealed. It's absurd. It's more of a punishment to the victims and their mother than to the pervert. In 6 years, the children will not even be teen-agers. Even if they don't remember this monster, their mother's fear of him will have a serious effect on them. This should not be allowed to happen. The victims should be considered in the sentencing, and clearly they were not.
The mother said that it was Rooney's seemingly normal existence that made his crimes more chilling.
She said: 'He was not your stereotype of a paedophile and that is the scariest thing. He was a respected sailor in the Navy, who would have had to go through the strongest of background checks to work in Whitehall.
'He was really sneaky, horrible and manipulative. It was scary just how confident he was. What we have been through is every mother's worst nightmare.
'If I had any advice for others it would be to always believe what your children say, go with your gut feeling and listen to what they are saying.'
After the case, investigator Det Con Pete Shotton said: '(Rooney) was utterly driven by his preoccupation with child sexual abuse. That one little phone call has uncovered one of the nastiest predatory paedophiles we've dealt with. He gloried in it.'
The defendant lived in Plymouth when his original offences were committed but moved to Bradford after he was released from prison last year.
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