Iyad Albattikhi, Paedos, Foreigners, Fear, Failed Policing And Racism In Lancashire
IN BLACKBURN, “Jordanian takeaway owner Iyad Albattikhi” has been found guilty of head-butting an 18-year-old woman, said to be his former girlfriend.
The Lancashire Telegraph reports that Mr Albattikhi has been sentenced to 20 weeks custody and given a two-year restraining order:
Albattikhi had been living in Blackburn and running Funnyboyz – now Mr Beanz – when 13-year-old Charlene Downes went missing in 2003. She has never been found. Albattikhi was charged with her murder and his landlord and business partner Mohammed Raveshi was charged with assisting an offender. But after a jury failed to reach a verdict in a first trial in May 2007, the case collapsed ahead of a retrial.
You can read more about that case here – and how the Lancashire Police failed.
Today’s report goes on:
The 18-year-old victim in this case was the Blackburn man’s former girlfriend and the court heard she was lured into a lifestyle of drink and drugs. She tried to leave the premises after a row but Albattikhi assaulted her in the street and tried to tamper with the CCTV.
The paper is reporting the facts. To do anything else would be wrong – and possibly dangerous. The EDL has been making mileage of the disappearance of Charlene Downes.
And today the Times leads with a story of children being groomed for sex. The front-page headline tells us:
2,000 victims but child sex grooming is ‘hidden issue’
More than 2,000 victims identified over the past three years are likely to represent a fraction of the total, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) will say in the first assessment of the extent of grooming, to be published next week.
What fraction, we are not told. But we can tell you a bit about CEOP. Andy Hayman “a former assistant commissioner for specialist operations in the Metropolitan Police”, also writes in the Times:
The findings from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) expose major deficiencies in the way that agencies tackle the grooming and exploitation of victims. It will need more than slight adjustments to fix these issues. CEOP has an impressive record. It has brought large numbers of sex offenders to justice and helped to devise ways to protect vulnerable people…
The reputation of CEOP suggests that it will work hard to correct these issues, but they are not helped by the Government. CEOP will soon lose its stand-alone status as it moves into the new National Crime Agency. There are concerns that it will lose its sphere of influence, which may restrict its negotiations with other agencies as it tries to inject more resources into child protection…
The choice is simple: unless there is more investment there will be more victims.
Hayman has written on this before:
These Ceop officers have the guile and patience to impersonate a child, thereby snaring the roaming paedophile trying to groom an innocent victim. When it is too late and the victim is caught, they have to balance carefully trying to elicit incriminating evidence against the attacker and offering care and support.
One of the main reasons this was so successful was having one agency dealing with the problem. So why would anyone want to change it ?
So. Today’s story is presented by a group keen to prove its worth.
The results of the five-month investigation show that 20 per cent of those identified are of Asian origin. Although it concludes that child grooming cannot be associated with a particular ethnic group, meetings have been held with civil servants from the Department for Education about how to “present” publication in the media… CEOP reports that there were 2,083 victims, many of whom were aged between 14 and 15, between January 2008 and March this year. More than half of them were girls, with records showing 1,264 female and 182 male.
Why mention the Asian element and then say that is can be discounted?
The information gathered from agencies including police, local councils and childrens charities, is so poorly recorded that the agency was unable to uncover the gender of the remaining victims.
The findings also show that there were 1,217 perpetrators, though not all these individuals were charged with offences. In almost 40 per cent of cases ethnicity was unknown to the authorities, either because it had not been recorded or could not be found.
That’s on the Times’ front page. Inside, on 15, we learn:
Of the 2,083 victims identified by CEOP, 61 per cent were white but they were unable to identify the ethnicity of most of the remainder.
It might be that 80% of the child abusers are not Asian. It might be that 39% of the victims are Asian. The facts are all. Which brings us back to the Lancashire Telegraph’s “Jordanian takeaway owner Iyad Albattikhi” – a man once “linked” to the disappearance of a young white girl and cleared of any wrong doing in court. Why mention that he is Jordanian? Why not mention the young woman’s ethnicity?
Get this from Keith Vaz, chairman of the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, in the Times:
“The findings are a cause for enormous concern because it appears to be a much larger issue than originally imagined… Mr Vaz warned against stigmatising whole communities as perpetrators but added: “If indeed it requires upsetting groups or individuals, it just has to be done because we need to get to the bottom of a vital issue in a careful and measured way so we can confirm the extent of the problem and whether there are any particular patterns to it.”
He that said it was vital for all organisations to collaborate effectively in dealing with the subject, whatever their ethnic background. Mr Vaz added thatthe paucity of information on child sex grooming uncovered by CEOP indicated that the figures were “just the tip of an iceberg”.
And there it is again – that mention of the ethnic element . Vaz wants us to know that race isn’t relevant but if it relevant it will be, er, relevant.
This story has the lot: a paucity of facts, fear, foreigners, sex, children, racists, politics and vested interest groups…
Spotter: Karen
Posted: 20th, June 2011 | In: Key Posts, Reviews Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
