THE RAPE GANGS WERE INVESTIGATED. THE ORGANISATION THE MEN BELONGED TO NEVER WAS.
DOES THE BIRADERI MEET THE LEGAL DEFINITION OF TERRORISM?
RAJA MIAH
On 29 October the Home Secretary must publish how she decides which organisations can be proscribed. Before she does, there is one question she needs to answer.
Criminal organisations do not operate in the open. They hide behind fronts. They use the cover of family, community, faith and tradition to mask their activities. They exploit the very things that hold a society together.
That is why the investigation cannot start with those structures. It has to begin with the actions. With the money that moves, the people who are silenced, the places that are used, the crimes that are committed.
Only then can you see the shape of what lies behind it. Only then can you separate the organisation from the community it hides within.
To do otherwise is to make the community itself the crime. It is to say that the culture, the faith, the family is the root of the wrongdoing. And that is the very accusation they want us to make. Branding us racist and far right allows them to dismiss us. This is one of the main reasons they struggled to silence me when I took them on. Not just because I am a brown faced Muslim man with a decorated career in anti racism, but because of the way I presented the evidence.
The biraderi is not a race. It is not a religion. It is more than a kinship group. It is a set of men and the things they do together. Prove that, and you strike at the heart of the real problem while also freeing the innocent from with the communities where they operate.
Part 3 ended with a law and a question. The law is section 11 of the Terrorism Act 2000, fourteen years for belonging to a proscribed organisation, no crime to be proved against the man. The question is whether the biraderi can be put on that list.
It can only go on the list if it is concerned in terrorism, and terrorism has a definition. Here it is, as the Act reads today.
(1) In this Act “terrorism” means the use or threat of action where (a) the action falls within subsection (2), (b) the use or threat is designed to influence the government or an international governmental organisation or to intimidate the public or a section of the public, and (c) the use or threat is made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.
(2) Action falls within this subsection if it (a) involves serious violence against a person, (b) involves serious damage to property, (c) endangers a person’s life, other than that of the person committing the action, (d) creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public, or (e) is designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system.
(3) The use or threat of action falling within subsection (2) which involves the use of firearms or explosives is terrorism whether or not subsection (1)(b) is satisfied.
The law asks three questions.
- Was there serious violence?
- Was it used to intimidate people or influence government?
- Was it done to advance a political, religious, racial or ideological cause?
All three have to meet in the same action.
The first question is simple. Was there serious violence? Yes. And it was proved to the criminal standard in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, Huddersfield, Halifax, Oxford, Newcastle, Bradford and Oldham. For thirty years, these towns witnessed horrors. A twelve year old girl passed between three brothers like a piece of meat. Another child with a gun held to her head. Petrol doused over girls to make them comply.
I am not building my case on isolated incidents. What matters is what the violence was for and whether it was part of a system. That is what we have to examine.
Jay recorded girls being forced to watch other girls raped and being told the same would happen to them if they spoke. Crowther found children held at gunpoint. That violence silenced people. The legal question is whether that was the point of it. Was the violence being used to keep girls, families and whole communities quiet?
We also know the vote has been corrupted and coerced. Birmingham elections were voided for corrupt practices. Tower Hamlets was voided in part for undue spiritual influence. The Electoral Commission identified areas with Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities as being at greater risk. Police are still investigating candidate fraud in Tameside. What nobody has established is whether any of that belongs to the same organisation as the rape gangs.
Judge Clifton said one factor was that the Rochdale girls were outside the offenders’ community and religion. Girls have described being called kuffar. That matters. It shows how some offenders saw their victims. But the Terrorism Act asks a harder question.
Was the violence being used to advance a religious, racial or political cause?
My conclusion is that race and religion mattered. The girls were White, poor and outside the men’s community. Some offenders used religious language about them. Judge Clifton said community and religion were factors. But that is still not enough for proscription. The law does not ask whether religion helped a rapist justify himself. It asks whether the violence was being used to advance a cause.
The political purpose is easier to see. Control the votes. Control the selections. Win the seats. Control the council. I have photographed the meetings. Men only. One community. Candidates chosen through the clan structure. Branches suspended when the wrong candidate is likely to win. Then come the council powers. Housing. Planning. Licences. Grants. That is political power. But again, that is not enough. The remaining question is whether the violence belonged to the same thing.
So this is where we are. The violence is proved. There is evidence it was used to silence. There is evidence of a religious, racial and political purpose. What is not proved is the connection between them. That is the join.
Do the men who raped the girls belong to the same structure as the men who deliver the votes? Did the violence serve that structure? Or were these two things simply happening in the same towns?
Do the men who owned the houses, selected the candidates, ran the branches and delivered the votes answer to the same people? Nobody has checked.
The same question applies to what happened to me. A member of the biraderi publicly offered to kill me. The woman who went on to lead Oldham Council posted love hearts underneath it. Police have admitted to me that I was arrested on the instructions of Pakistani politicians. I then spent three years on bail while case after case collapsed. Was that separate? Or was it the same machine?
So far, every institution looked at its own piece. The police looked at the rapes. The Electoral Commission looked at the ballots. The auditors, when forced, looked at the money. Nobody has looked across all three. Nobody has asked if it was one organisation involved in all three.
There is one more legal hurdle. The Home Secretary cannot proscribe a group because some of its members committed terrorism. She needs evidence that the organisation itself is involved. It can commit terrorism. Help prepare it. Encourage it. Or otherwise be involved in it. But the link has to be there.
Even if the legal test is met, proscription is not automatic. She then asks how big the organisation is. What threat it poses. How much of a presence it has in Britain. The Home Office also considers threats to Britons overseas and wider international factors.
Not Pakistanis. Not Muslims. Not everybody who belongs to a kinship network. I am talking about the people who can be shown, through what they do, to belong to the organisation I have described. The people who move the votes. Select the candidates. Supply the houses. Move the girls. Close the files. Protect the men.
Prove that structure. Name the people inside it. Leave everybody else alone.
I know the difference between an ethnicity and an extremist organisation. I spent twenty years working on that distinction. There is a medal in a drawer for it.
The clock is running. The Crime and Policing Act became law on 29 April. Section 240 gives the Home Secretary six months to publish the rules and procedures she uses for proscription. That takes us to 29 October.
Before then I want three answers.
- Has the biraderi ever been put to the Proscription Review Group?
- Has anyone tested it against Sections 1 and 3?
- If not, why not?
Put the answers in the document.
That person is Shabana Mahmood. She has been Home Secretary since September 2025. She has represented Birmingham Ladywood since 2010.
In 2019 her majority was 28,582. In 2024 it was 3,421. An independent took 12,137 votes off her in a single night in what had been one of the safest Labour seats in England.
In 2004 her father, Mahmood Ahmed, was election agent for the three Bordesley Green Labour councillors whose elections Mawrey voided for corrupt and illegal practices. Her own postal ballot was among the documents examined in that case. The application and the declaration of identity carry two different signatures. The court transcript records that her ballot documents were referred to the Crown Prosecution Service after doubts about a discrepancy described as unsustainable. No action was taken.
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Her spokesperson says she signed both documents, that the handwriting is plainly hers, that she was a twenty-two year old student who signed two different documents weeks apart in different ways, and that allegations against her father were tested and dismissed with no adverse finding over twenty years ago, after evidence from a handwriting expert and witness statements. That is her account and it is on the record.
Then the part that is not about 2004. On the evening of 1 May this year, the night before the Birmingham Dispatch published, her special adviser Joshua Williams sent the paper a three-page legal letter. It threatened an injunction and two lawsuits. Williams is a government special adviser and he was writing from the Home Office.
The letter said she had no involvement in the proceedings arising from the Birmingham election petitions whatsoever. That she did not give oral evidence, did not provide a witness statement, and was not called or asked to participate in any capacity. The transcript shows her ballot was raised in court and that she submitted evidence.
Just after midnight the same adviser wrote again, from his personal email rather than his government account, to clarify that everything he had sent was as her personal adviser and not on behalf of the Home Office. He did not repeat the threats.
She has never been found by any court to have done anything wrong. No charge was brought and none has ever been suggested. I make no allegation against her and I do not need to. I am telling you who decides.
A woman of Pakistani heritage whose own family are associated with the Biraderi.
A Home Secretary whose seat was nearly taken from her by a 12,137-vote independent challenge in one night. Whose father was election agent for three Labour councillors whose elections were voided for corrupt and illegal practices. Whose own ballot paperwork was referred to the Crown Prosecution Service. Whose adviser wrote from the Home Office threatening legal action against a newspaper, then clarified after midnight that he was acting as her personal adviser.
She is the one who decides whether to put the biraderi forward for proscription, and she has until 29 October to say in writing how she makes decisions like that.
If either the Conservatives or Reform had the courage to do so, they would ask her. It is a question that can no longer be ignored.
I am Raja Miah MBE. It is now eight years since I first started to expose how politicians protected the rape gangs. I have spent almost a decade of my life fighting to safeguard little White girls from gang rape by politically protected gangs of predominantly Pakistani men.
I have spent three years on bail as Andy Burnham’s police force was involved in falsifying evidence in an attempt to imprison me. My mother died before I was able to clear my name.
The truth is now out and there is a national inquiry because I helped force it.
If my words have ever helped you make sense of a broken system, if they’ve ever made you feel seen, heard, or hopeful, please don’t scroll past.
Support my work. This fight is far from over.
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(UKR)