These are the unspeakable stories women shared with me about their abuse at the hands of Asian grooming gangs in London. Forget what Sadiq Khan says, this is the truth: CHARLIE PETERS

After being plied with vodka and cocaine, Sasha, a 16-year-old girl from Rotherham, south Yorkshire, was bundled into a car and driven to London.

By this time, she had been raped or abused by more than 100 men since being targeted by a grooming gang as she left school one day five years earlier.

Once in the capital, her driver, a man called Mahmood, took Sasha to a flat and introduced her to several men.

Like her abusers in Rotherham – and in Bradford and Birmingham, where she was also trafficked – the men she met were of Pakistani heritage. This time, however, they spoke with London accents.

She was taken back to London on three further occasions, during which Sasha said she was subjected to repeated rapes and forced to carry out a variety of depraved sex acts.

The men involved were not only high on cannabis and cocaine but also conducting drug deals, a situation which raises the possibility that Sasha was used as a ‘human chattel’, offered to obtain drugs for free or at a reduced price.

‘I never saw money changing hands but it is a possibility,’ she told me, adding: ‘Why would they take me all that way for free?’

Proof of this attitude among high-ranking Labour politicians was evident when London’s mayor, Sir Sadiq Khan stonewalled questions put to him by his Tory opposite Susan Hall

But her experience of being trafficked raised another disturbing possibility – that a crime mostly associated with northern towns such as Rotherham and Rochdale is also happening in London.

In the course of investigating the grooming gangs phenomenon as a reporter for GB News, I have interviewed dozens of victims across the country. I am convinced that – through a combination of naivety and inaction on the part of the Metropolitan Police and local politicians – the same pattern of abuse has been repeated in the capital.

Last week, Labour’s grooming gangs inquiry – announced by Sir Keir Starmer in June after he had previously argued an inquiry was not necessary – collapsed into chaos.

Both of the candidates who had been shortlisted to chair the inquiry withdrew. Meanwhile, four abuse victims resigned from an advisory panel set up to advise the investigation and are now demanding the safeguarding minister Jess Phillips steps down, claiming she implied they were liars for raising concerns about widening the scope of the inquiry.

This is just the latest appalling development in what has been a conspiracy of silence and obfuscation surrounding the decades-long grooming scandal.

A scandal where gangs of predominantly Pakistani men were allowed to prey on young girls unhindered because the ideology of diversity and community-cohesion was given greater priority by politicians and civic leaders than the safeguarding of victims.

Only in January, for example, Sir Keir accused those calling for a national inquiry of ‘jumping on a bandwagon’ and ‘amplifying’ the demands of the far-Right.

Proof of this attitude among high-ranking Labour politicians was also evident that same month when London’s mayor, Sir Sadiq Khan, stonewalled questions put to him by his Conservative opposite number Susan Hall.

She made nine successive attempts to ask Khan if rape gangs had operated in the capital or if they were still an active concern.

Instead of giving Hall’s line of questioning the considered response it deserved, he kept firing back requests for her to clarify what she meant by grooming gangs, claiming: ‘I’m not clear what she means.’ He even tried to change the subject by observing that young people were being ‘groomed’ in the capital by County Lines drug gangs. A classic example of widening the scope instead of laser focus on this form of exploitation.

Closing out the back-and-forth exchange, the mayor said: ‘I’m still none the wiser why she’s so nervous about saying what she means.’

But he knew exactly why she might be nervous. At the time, politicians and reporters were still being accused of racism for pointing out the over-representation of Pakistanis in what mealy-mouthed politicians labelled ‘group-based child sexual exploitation cases’, a clinical term for what I call grooming gangs committing child rape.

Ms Hall clearly avoided the issue of ethnicity in a bid to avoid a political attack and to ensure the focus was kept purely on the crisis at hand.

But Khan obstinately refused to play ball. A month later, in February, a Tory proposal to budget £4.5 million for an ‘independent inquiry into the exploitation of children in London’ was voted down by Labour members of the London Assembly supported by Green, Liberal Democrat and ‘independent’ members –presumably on the basis that they didn’t think there was a problem.

But a problem there certainly is, and has been for many years. A newspaper report last week revealed that evidence of grooming in the capital, citing six potential victims, was contained in four different reports from His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services between 2016 and 2025.

The reports contained details of girls as young as 13 being plied with drugs and alcohol and raped by gangs of men – and they were read by the same Sadiq Khan who stone-walled Susan Hall on grooming gangs. They were also acknowledged by Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, who went on to reveal the organisation had a ‘steady flow’ of live child sexual exploitation investigations involving multiple offenders, even though he claimed earlier to have heard ‘no reports’ of Rochdale or Rotherham-style rape gangs in London.

During my own investigations, one social worker from an east London borough told me that they have been inundated with cases of girls being groosamed by these abusers.

Unlike many of the former mill and mining towns in the North and the Midlands, London’s population has a vast range of demographics. This is reflected in its grooming gang victims and perpetrators.

‘There are non-white girls and boys caught up in these cases,’ the social worker said, adding: ‘And the culprits are diverse, too.’

The worker lamented that social services and local authorities were ill-equipped to handle the gangs – and that laws around confidentiality in the NHS mean that when young teenage girls become pregnant as a result of rape, they are unable to step in and inform the family.

In one ongoing case involving a pregnant 15-year-old girl, I was informed, the victim told her social workers that she was ‘in love’ with one of her abusers. The social worker believes that more than 100 men have been involved in her exploitation for years.

The 15-year-old was first approached by older men while on a night out with her friends.

Girls are often introduced to perpetrators by other victims, the social worker said, with girls being rewarded by their abusers for facilitating introductions.

In this specific case, the victim is a Muslim girl, and the social worker has not been able to tell her parents about the pregnancy because it would create a safeguarding concern. ‘She would be at risk of “honour-based violence”,’ I was told. ‘Groomers are able to exploit this loophole because they know we can’t get the families involved.’

In May, GB News published a national audit of every grooming gang case that ended in a conviction. This revealed more than 50 towns and cities had been affected by the scandal, and our report went on to be central to the political conversation behind demands for a national grooming gangs inquiry.

It also revealed that there were extensive trafficking links between abuse gangs in south Yorkshire and Oxfordshire and networks in London.

The unspeakable excesses of these men were laid bare at the trial of Oxford-based Mohammed Karrar, Akhtar Dogar, Anjum Dogar and Kamar Jamil, whose abuse of one victim in particular was so horrific it left a number of hardened court reporters in tears.

From left to right, Akhtar Dogar, Anjum Dogar, Kamar Jamil, Assad Hussain, Mohammed Karrar, Bassam Karrar and Zeeshan Ahmed who were found guilty of charges involving vulnerable underage girls who were groomed for sexual exploitation

Karrar was alleged to have prepared the girl to be raped by five or six men and, at one point, four men simultaneously.

‘A red ball was placed in her mouth to keep her quiet,’ Judge Peter Rook revealed in his harrowing summing up.

When the victim discovered she was pregnant at 15, Karrar forced her to have an illegal abortion in Reading. Despite the nightmare she had endured, the girl was so brainwashed that she still considered Karrar – who was 38 when he was sentenced to life in 2013 – her boyfriend.

But the truth is that Karrar had many other victims. We know that one of them, who, like Sasha, was hooked on cocaine and cannabis, was sold to men in London for sex.

At the age of 14 or 15 – she remains so traumatised that she cannot remember exactly how old she was at the time – she was instructed to meet men at London’s Paddington station who proceeded to take her away for the purpose of sexual abuse.

She made the trip to the capital a total of six times. The Oxford gang sold access to these girls to their friends and family members in the capital.

Meanwhile, the London links stretch further still. A victim of other abusers in Bradford, who has secured prosecutions of some of the men who gang-raped her, described how their family members would regularly visit from across the country.

‘Some of the men involved took me down to London,’ she said. ‘All I remember is breaking the heel of my shoe, with the men having to stop off and buy me new high heels. I can’t even remember getting back to Bradford, I was so completely out of it.’

But she did remember that the members of her grooming gang considered their London clients to be more important than the rest. They would get agitated when London-based men visited – asking victims to introduce them to more girls and pointing to the power and influence that such men wielded.

Another victim from Bradford also said she was trafficked to London. Fiona Broadfoot was groomed by a ‘boyfriend’ who became her pimp and forced her to sell sex on the capital’s streets.

Given a criminal record as a prostitute rather than being treated as a victim of child sexual, she later told the BBC that perpetrators had been allowed to ‘do what they want’.

In Halifax, one schoolgirl said she was preyed on by more than 100 ‘Asian’ men, and London was listed as one of her main trafficking destinations.

But, despite all of these horror stories, just a handful of men have ever been jailed for their role in London’s grooming gangs.

In 2013, a gang was prosecuted, resulting in three London men being jailed after they trafficked a ‘troubled’ girl to Ipswich where she was treated ‘like a piece of meat’ and a sex slave. Mohammed Sheikh, Hamza Ali and Suran Uddin were all convicted of sex offences and trafficking. Only Uddin remains behind bars.

Meanwhile, at court proceedings I attended in Sheffield Crown Court last year, I saw Sasha finally obtain some degree of justice. Seven men were in the dock for abusing her and another Rotherham survivor. They were jailed for a total of more than 100 years.

The court heard how she was picked up outside her school gates at the age of 11 and subjected to escalating levels of abuse, which culminated in her being raped in taxis while still wearing her school uniform.

But only a handful of the men responsible for her terrible suffering have been jailed; the majority remain at large. Some have fled to Pakistan, fearing that the law might finally catch up with them after decades of laughing in the face of British justice.

And there is a group of men that this Rotherham woman knows are unlikely to be investigated and prosecuted thanks to the culture of denial that still infects our political class: the rapists who trafficked her to London and abused her in the capital.

• Charlie Peters is a national reporter and presenter for GB News.