23 Somalis on
Trial in Tennessee for Sex Slavery
(Nashville, Tennessee March 06, 2012 Ceegaag Online)
Twenty-three Somalis will go on trial this
month in connection with operating a sex slavery
ring that sold little girls into slavery in
Minneapolis, Minnesota; Nasvhille, Tennessee; and
other cities.
According to the Tennessean, the trial
will be unusual because all the defendants will
appear before judge and jury at the same time.
Agents from the federal Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) agency collared the 30 Africans
in November 2010.
The paper reported,
In an era when
limited resources and risk aversion have resulted
in a dramatic rise in the number of cases that end
in plea agreements rather than jury trials, not
even one of the 30 defendants in the case has
agreed to plead guilty, setting the stage for a
massive trial in downtown Nashville that is
raising a variety of issues both legal and
logistical.
Though the media has not mentioned it, the
defendants are almost certainly Muslims.
Somalia is a Muslim country.
The Case
According to ICE, local, state, and federal
police in Nashville, Minneapolis, and St. Paul
locked up 29 Somalis “who were listed in a federal
indictment which was unsealed listing various
charges, including sex trafficking juveniles and
conspiring to sex traffic juveniles, obstruction
of justice, perjury, auto theft and credit card
fraud....”
The indictment
results from an investigation that began in 2008
and alleges that the defendants are involved in or
are associates of the following gangs which are
connected to one another: the Somali Outlaws, the
Somali Mafia, and the Lady Outlaws.
As well,
ICE reported, “members and associates of the
gangs transported underage Somali and
African-American females from the Minneapolis area
to Nashville for the purpose of having the females
engage in sex acts for money and other items of
value.”
Some of the girls were 13 years old or younger,
the indictment alleged.
The indictment
further charges that members and associates of the
gangs conspired to obstruct the investigation and
committed perjury during the course of testimony
before the federal grand jury investigating the
case. The indictment also alleges that members and
associates of these gangs stole a motor vehicle
and used it to engage in credit card fraud, which
amounted to a $231,000 loss to one credit card
company in about a one-year period.
As with American gangs, the Somali criminals
boast nicknames such as Forehead, Gangster
Boo, Chi Town, Rear Hammer, and Black Cat Junior.
The 30th defendant, the
Tennessean reported, was arrested
later.
According to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune,
authorities busted the Somali gang while some of
its members were leaving a parking lot with one of
its victims in the car.
“One victim, Jane Doe One,” the
newspaper reported, “was first taken from
Minneapolis to Nashville in December 2005 to sell
for sex. She was 13 at the time.”
There, investigators
say, she and other girls were set up in a
brothel-like apartment. Jane Doe One told an FBI
agent that some of the men she was forced to have
sex with were so repulsive, the only way she could
endure it was to inhale gasoline fumes or use
drugs.
But it was an April
2009 traffic stop that proved pivotal to the case.
Another victim, who had run away from home,
suffered terribly at the hands of the men. “The
men picked the girl up from school on Friday,
allegedly passed her around several times for sex
over the weekend at locations across the Twin
Cities, then drove to Nashville to sell her
there,” the
newspaper reported.
Once there, the Somalis used a cellphone to
video-record sex acts with the girl, who was in
the 1999 Lincoln with the men when federal and
local police caught them.
The gang operated for more than a decade, the
Star-Tribune reported.
The Trial
Seven of the defendants, including two still at
large, the
Tennessean reported, have separated
their trials from the rest, leaving the 23 who
will appear before a jury.
The African cadre is so large because none of
the men has “flipped,” as authorities describe it
when criminals turn on their partners and
cooperate with prosecutors in exchange for
leniency. A former federal prosecutor for
Tennessee’s Middle District, Ed Yarbrough,
told the newspaper that Somalis have a
“cultural thing about testifying against each
other.... That’s what I’ve been told.”
The
newspaper reported, “There has been at least
one alleged incident of witness tampering in the
case proceeding toward trial in Nashville.”
Three Twin Cities
women ... were charged in June in a five-count
indictment that includes charges of “conspiracy to
retaliate against a witness, victim or informant.”
The three women
threatened a witness identified only by the
initials “MA” and then attacked her in her
Minnesota apartment building elevator, according
to the charges.
Sex Gangs Nothing New
Sex gangs might seem a new phenomenon to some
Americans, but in Britain, the gangs are out of
control.
In June, a center for exploited children
reported that as many as 2,000 British girls
have been forced into sex slavery. As well, a sex
slavery gang was on trial in Britain at the same
time.
London’s
Daily Mail has
repeatedly reported on Muslim sex slavery in
the country, describing in great detail those who
are responsible: mostly Pakistani Muslims.
According to a report from one think tank, the
Mail noted in January last year, at the
time Britain had witnessed “17 court prosecutions
since 1997, 14 of them in the past three years,
involving the on-street grooming of girls aged 11
to 16 by groups of men.”
But now the issue has emerged again. British
conservatives are enraged that the media, they
claim, refuse to report on the trial of 47 Muslim
sex slavers who appeared in court in Liverpool on
January 3.
Critics claim the trial has been kept
“secret.”
The
British National Party leadership is not only
upset about the media blackout but also another
shocking fact: Those on trial for the sex slavery
had been arrested and released for the same crime
in the past. The party's
website reported,
For at least some of
these alleged groomers, it would appear that this
is not the first time that they have appeared in
court on the allegations of abusing young girls.
On the 8th June 2011,
eight men appeared in Rochdale Magistrates Court,
charged with conspiracy to commit penetrative
sexual activity with a female under the age of 16
years. These men all received bail, even though
two of them did not even turn up on the day.
The men who appeared
in Rochdale in June last year were Abdul Rauf, age
42, Liaqat Shah, age 40, Adil Khan, age 41, Qamar
Shahzad, age 29, Mohammed Sajid, age 34, Mohammed
Ikhlaq, age 31, Mohammed Amin, age 44, and Abdul
Aziz, age 40....
Now the same names
have appeared on the list of those sent for the
pre-trial hearing in Liverpool. If these are the
same men, it beggars belief that not only were
they granted bail when originally held, but then
went back onto our streets, and allegedly
committed the same crimes again.
The BNP
website features a poster that says “our
children are not halal meat.” Halal is a term that
describes what is lawful in Islam and familiar to
most in descriptions of food acceptable to eat.
The words hark back to what a British detective
told the Daily Mail, that British girls
“are being passed around and used as meat.”
In November,
British authorities promised a crackdown on
the sex slavers.
Source: thenewamerican.com
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