Paedophile gang jailed for their part in a child sex ring which exploited vulnerable white teenage girls. They are (top row left to right): Abdul Rauf, Hamid Safi, Mohammed Sajid and Abdul Aziz; (bottom row left to right) Abdul Qayyum, Adil Khan, Mohammed Amin and Kabeer Hassan

London, May 9: Nine men — eight of them Pakistani and one Afghan — were sent to prison today for between 19 and four years for raping underage white girls and passing them round for sex.

Sex abuse is not confined to any one community but this particular case has assumed an explosive racial dimension because of the frequency with which older Pakistani men in the north of England are being prosecuted for preying on vulnerable white girls usually from broken homes.

In January last year, there was a storm of protest when Jack Straw, a Labour MP, identified what he considered a racial pattern to the abuse.

Straw, a former foreign secretary whose Blackburn constituency contains a substantial Pakistani population, alleged that “there is a specific problem which involves Pakistani heritage men... who target vulnerable young white girls”.

Today’s conviction of the nine men in a high profile trial in the Liverpool Crown Court will be interpreted by the Right-wing in British politics as confirmation of Straw’s observations on Pakistani men.

“We need to get the Pakistani community to think much more clearly about why this is going on and to be more open about the problems that are leading to a number of Pakistani heritage men thinking it is OK to target white girls in this way,” Straw had said.

“These young men are in a western society, in any event, they act like any other young men, they’re fizzing and popping with testosterone, they want some outlet for that, but Pakistani heritage girls are off-limits and they are expected to marry a Pakistani girl from Pakistan, typically,” he went on.

“So they then seek other avenues and they see these young women, white girls who are vulnerable, some of them in care... who they think are easy meat. Because they’re vulnerable they ply them with gifts, they give them drugs, and then of course they’re trapped.”The BBC has been trying not to inflame anti-Pakistani and anti-Muslim sentiment by referring to the perpetrators in the current grim case as “Asian”. But this has angered sections of the Indian community who point out that the term “Asian” refers to South Asians — Indians are Asian, too, but the phenomenon of older men targeting under-16 white girls does appear to be peculiarly Pakistani in Yorkshire and other areas in the north of England.

The Labour MP Keith Vaz, chairman of the Home Affairs select committee in the Commons, expressed a fear that comments such as those made by Straw could provoke a reaction from those who do not want people of Pakistani origin living in Britain.

He also objected to the presence of far Right groups, such as the British National Party and the English Defence League, which had picketed the trial in Liverpool. “They seek to take the Pakistani community on its own and divide it from the rest of us, not even the Asian community, it’s a particular section of the Asian community, and we must not allow that to happen because it’s not true,” said Vaz. “It’s factually inaccurate.What we need to deal with is the criminality involved, go through the courts, prosecute and deal with it in that way.”

However, Judge Gerald Clifton appeared to take the opposite view as he told the nine men as they were sentenced: “All of you treated (the victims) as though they were worthless and beyond any respect. One of the factors leading to that was the fact that they were not part of your community or religion.”

There was one especially harrowing account of a girl continuing to be raped by a group of men even though she was vomiting.

The leader of the sex ring is a 59-year-old who cannot be named for legal reasons. But he was jailed for a total of 19 years for conspiracy, two counts of rape, aiding and abetting a rape, sexual assault and a count of trafficking within the UK for sexual exploitation.

His defence lawyer, Simon Nichol, had told the court that his client had refused to be tried by an all white jury. “He believes his convictions have nothing to do with justice but result from the faith and the race of the defendants. He further believes that society failed the girls in this case before the girls even met them and now that failure is being blamed on a weak minority group.”

The judge called the defendant an “unpleasant and hypocritical bully” and rejected the notion that Pakistani Muslims were being picked on. “Some of you, when arrested, said it was triggered by race,” the judge said. “That is nonsense. What triggered this prosecution was your lust and greed.”

There was support for the judge from Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of Ramadhan Foundation, a Manchester-based Muslim organisation that works for “peaceful co-existence and dialogue for all communities”. He accused Pakistani community elders of “burying their heads in the sand” on the issue of on-street grooming.Shafiq commented: “There is a significant problem for the British Pakistani community, there is an over-representation amongst recent convictions in the crime of on-street grooming, there should be no silence in addressing the issue of race as this is central to the actions of these criminals. They think that white teenage girls are worthless and can be abused without a second thought; it is this sort of behaviour that is bringing shame on our community. I urge the police and the councils not to be frightened to address this issue, there is a strong lesson that you cannot ignore race or be over sensitive.”