'Alleged members of trafficking ring took 12-year-old girl to sex party to be raped by up to nine men at a time'

A girl aged 12 was taken to sex parties by two alleged members of a child sex trafficking gang to be raped by up to nine men at a time, a court heard today.

The girl, known as “Girl D”, said that she believed for years that one of the men - Mohammed Karrar, 38 - acted out of love for her. And she told the jury that the beatings he meted out to her over the years had become “the norm” by that point in her life.

A jury at the Old Bailey heard this morning that the girl was drugged and raped by Mohammed and Bassam Karrar, as well as by other men they arranged to meet her in towns across the country. She added that she was introduced to hard drugs, including heroin, by Mohammed Karrar, who she said he injected her with it.

At times, she said, she took the drug herself because it was ‘better than being alive’.

Girl D was giving evidence in the trial of nine men accused of running a child sex trafficking ring in the Oxford area, among them the Karrar brothers.

“I felt the need to be on a high, it was better than being there and [being] alive; it was better than feeling,” she said. She told the jury that the drink and drugs she took during her alleged abuse at the hands of the two men “removed the pain”, albeit briefly.

Asked about the hold she said Mohammed Karrar had over her, Girl D said: “I feel stupid but, at the time, I did believe that he loved me. I was hoping that he loved me, I suppose. Some of the time, I felt able to refuse [his demands to engage in sexual activity with him and other men], but not all the time.

“If I refused, 80 per cent of the time [Mohammed Karrar] would go mad at me, I would get slapped and kicked; sometimes, he would strangle me.”

She described one occasion on which she said Mohammed Karrar beat her so severely for refusing to have sex with a man he arranged for her to meet that she was left with a bruised and swollen face and could not leave the house. Some of the men she would be made to have sex with before her 13th birthday, she said, were aged up to around 50-years-old.

And she added that, on the few occasions she attempted to escape his influence, Mohammed Karrar would either try to coax her round or would simply refuse to allow her to leave. “I would sit me on his lap and give me a cuddle and say ‘why do you feel the need to go’? and ‘I will always do right by you’.

“Other times, he would say you know you won’t go, so there is no point trying because I won’t allow it,” she said.

She said that she felt jealousy when she saw Mohammed Karrar with other girls her age because of the love she said she felt towards him. But, she added: “another part was that it was someone else’s life waiting to be ruined and it is not fair.”

Mohammed and Bassam Karrar, along with another set of brothers: Akhtar, 32; and Anjum Dogar, 30, are among the nine men in the dock. Alongside them are: Kamar Jamil, 27; Assad Hussain, 32; and Bilal Ahmed, 26. Mohammed Hussain, 24; and Zeeshan Ahmed, 27 are also on trial. The nine face a total of 51 charges, which they deny. The trial continues.