Grooming ring accused denies drugging and raping
A man accused of grooming and raping underage girls as part of an Oxford child sex ring tells the Old Bailey the alleged victims are lying.
Mohammed Karrar, 38, is one of nine men on trial at the Old Bailey charged with offences including rape, trafficking and arranging the prostitution of underage girls.
The men are said to have groomed and assaulted six girls between 2004 and 2012 and were arrested in Thames Valley police’s Operation Bullfinch raids.
They are alleged to have targeted the victims when they were schoolgirls growing up in the university city, plying them with vodka, cocaine and heroin before raping them and selling them to other men.
Prosecutors say Karrar met one of his alleged victims – known only as “girl four” – when he was 30 and she was 11. He denies raping the girl.
Barrister Noel Lucas QC, for the prosecution, showed him a photograph of girl four taken when she was 12, saying: “A baby, isn’t she?”
Karrar said the girl had told him she was 16 but added that he never touched her.
‘Untrue account’
The defendant denied organising parties where he made the girl have sex with up to 15 men. He said the girl’s account of being injected with heroin and being taken to a house for a backroom abortion were also untrue.
A second girl says she was 13 when Mohammed Karrar started abusing her. He admits she performed a sex act on him but says she told him she was 20.
Barrister Noel Lucas QC, for the prosecution, said: “It was shortly her 13th birthday. She said she enjoyed your attention. It made her feel special, wanted, loved. You were grooming that girl.”
I never ever asked her for sex. There was that one time I had oral sex with her but that was it. Mohammed Karrar
Karrar replied: “I never ever asked her for sex. There was that one time I had oral sex with her but that was it.”
He also denied getting the girl hooked on hard drugs and selling her to other men in London, Manchester and Coventry.
Mr Lucas said: “You were into sex with young girls.”
Karrar told the court: “No. I did not.”
‘Absolute lies’
The barrister said: “The best you’ve come up with is that they’re all lying.” Karrar replied: “Yes – they’re all friends”.
Asked why the girls would lie in such intimate detail about him, Karrar said he did not know, but that the evidence was “absolute lies” and “stories”.
Karrar, of Kames Close, Oxford, has pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to rape, rape, trafficking for sexual exploitation, arranging child prostitution and using an assault with intent to procure a miscarriage.
The nine defendants deny more than 60 charges between them.
