The quashing of charges against Anver Daud Sheikh is welcome news, and sign of a dawning realisation that the whole scare about rampant abuse of children in care was yet another witch hunt. Not of course that such abuses never happen, but when the police go trawling, along the lines of “if you were at this home at this time, and were abused by ***, there could be some compensation in it for you”, then you’re liable to get some dubious testimony.
This case, though, was particularly absurd:
At the trial, the jury was given incorrect dates for Mr Sheikh’s employment at the home. After his conviction, he instructed new lawyers who established from Contributions Agency records that his employment at the home had ceased by August 31 1980.
The main complainant, who cannot be named for legal reasons, only took up residence at the home during August 1980. His testimony was dependent upon the involvement of another youth who did not arrive until a year later.
Richard Webster , who published a short book, “The Great Children’s Home Panic”, back in 1998, has more details on this case:
There was no evidence other than the testimony of the two men who made the allegations. But nor, twenty years after the alleged incidents, was Sheikh able to produce an adequate defence. Like countless other care workers trapped by similar retrospective allegations all he could say was that the offences alleged against him had never happened.
The jury, faced by two highly prejudicial complaints, one of which was an allegation of buggery, declined to believe him. He was convicted and sentenced to eight years.
Since then, however, as Bob Woffinden reported in the Times last year, one former resident of the same home, who had himself made an allegation and then retracted it, made a new statement. He said that the complainants ‘were racist and saw [Sheikh] as a “Paki bastard”‘. The witness added, in words almost identical to those which have been used by many many others who have been caught up in police trawling operations: ‘It was easy to make the allegations . . . the officers kept encouraging us.’
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