A prolific online sexual predator was caught only after investigators at the FBI contacted the UK’s National Crime Agency despite more than a dozen of his victims reporting him to British police beforehand, Sky News has learnt.
Last month, 26-year-old Abdul Elahi was jailed for 32 years after pleading guilty to 158 offences, including blackmailing victims to abuse themselves, their siblings, and children.
Some of the girls and women who Abdul Elahi coerced into sending intimate images of themselves have complained about their interactions with British police, being repeatedly told that they shouldn’t have sent the messages, and incorrectly informed that there was no way to investigate the person who had blackmailed them because they used WhatsApp to communicate.
“The lifelong mental effects faced by victims could be decreased massively if we were listened to when speaking up in the first place,” one of his victims, who had been blackmailed when she was still in secondary school, told Sky News.
“The acts are described as ‘awful’ and ‘some of the worst ever seen’ when talking about all of his victims combined, but when it was just me going to my local police station, somehow the blame was on me.”
Victims, academics, and support groups are calling for additional training for police in both receiving reports from victims and investigating similar cases in the future.
CPS demands meant delay in prosecuting Elahi
Abdul Elahi targeted nearly 2,000 people, including financially vulnerable victims on social media platforms and underage users on so-called “sugar daddy” websites, between 1 January 2017 and 7 August 2020.
At least 196 of his victims were in the UK.
He had initially been arrested on 19 December 2018 but continued to offend for almost two years as the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) did not believe there was enough evidence to press charges against him.
A spokesperson for the CPS told Sky News: “There had been a huge investigation covering several…
Source : skynews
