3 men found guilty of gang-raping 16-year-old, jailed for 30 years

Three Somali men, all aged 20, have been handed a combined 30-year-jail sentence after being found guilty of the rape of a 16-year-old girl.

Muhyadeen Osman, Bilal Ahmed and Mowled Yussuf were 17 years old when they attacked the girl at the Victoria Park Hotel in Manchester, regarding her as “easy prey”, a Manchester Crown Court heard.

Accounts of the event as told to the court say the girl was on her summer holidays when she met Ibrahim Jama, a friend of the gang, on BlackBerry Messenger.

They agreed to meet after exchanging messages. And Jama met her at a bus stop and soon convinced her to perform a sex act on him in an alleyway before he made reference to “his boys” at the Victoria Park hotel. She then accompanied him to the hotel.

“Once in the hotel she was then involved in what was talked about as a game of going to hotel rooms with the group and hiding away from the porter,” prosecuting Henry Blackshaw said.

CCTV captured the group and the girl disappearing into one hotel room for around 30 minutes while the attacks took place.

“What these defendants did wrong is allowing themselves to believe this young lady was willing to perform virtually any sex act on all of them, and failing to make an enquiry about her willingness or or indeed to care very much one way or the other,” Michael Goldwater said in defense of the three men.

These were young, immature men who got carried away, he added.

But Judge David Hernandez still found them guilty.

“This was a large group of young men in a hotel and the inference is you all saw her as easy prey,” he said.

“She didn’t really understand what was on your mind and this is probably because she was a naive, sexually inexperienced and vulnerable young girl.

“She found herself confronted with demands for sexual activity she did not wish to engage in and did not willingly consent. She had no choice and no opportunity to refuse,” he added..