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.
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.
