Sabrina Ruffles rounds-up the latest cases.
Several students at Bethnal Green Academy have been made wards of court, after three of their fellow students ran away to Syria in February to become ‘jihadi brides’. Police compiled a dossier detailing those students though to be particularly at risk; and this dossier was the basis for the recent High Court hearing. Scotland Yard anti-terror specialists and social workers took part in the proceedings.
A ‘ward of court’ is someone who is kept under the guardianship of the court. Having been designated as wards of court, ‘at risk’ Bethnal Green students are not allowed to leave the country without the express permission of a judge.
Other impressionable teens are likely to be monitored and regulated in the same way.
A Whitechapel drug dealer has been sent to jail for more than three years. Mohammed Rahman (28) pleaded guilty on two counts of possession with intent to supply class A and class B drugs. Snaresbrook Crown Court heard that Rahman was stopped outside his home on Brady Street, London E1, and found to be carrying 40 wraps of cocaine and heroin. At his home police subsequently found a further stash of class A drugs and cannabis, and £1000 in cash. The street value of the drugs in Rahman’s possession is estimated at £15, 000.
The treatment of a young family has been condemned by a judge after the father of the family took two council housing departments to court. The family first came to London from Birmingham in 2011 – father, mother, one child and another on the way. On arrival they stayed with relatives in Tower Hamlets, before applying to the local council for social housing. The council offered bed and breakfast accommodation in Havering, but when the family accepted this, Tower Hamlets housing department scrapped their application for social housing in the borough of Tower Hamlets. Housing officers maintained that the family would have to apply through their current borough of residence – Havering. Meanwhile Havering borough council insisted that it could not accept their application: this should have been completed by Tower Hamlets, Havering’s housing officers said.
Justice Cobb found that Tower Hamlets council was in breach of child protection laws for having dumped the family in another borough.
At Snaresbrook Crown Court last month a man was jailed for facilitating the rape of a customer in Walthamstow. Salah Mohammed (31) appeared to be touting for business as a minicab driver when a young woman approached him and asked him to drive her friend home, since she was feeling unwell. She took the precaution of noting down the car registration number, before phoning her friend’s parents to say she was on her way home. But the car never arrived, and the parents phoned the police.
Meanwhile Salah Mohammed drove the girl to his friend’s house in Walthamstow, where his accomplice raped the young female victim. She was later driven to Wood Green and dumped there.
Police used the registration number of the car to trace the perpetrators.
During the course of their investigations, it emerged that Salah Mohammed had already served a 10 year sentence for kidnap and encouraging or assisting the commission of rape.