Nazir Ahmed: Disgraced peer's sentence for child sex crimes slashed by three years

DISGRACED peer Nazir Ahmed’s sentence for child sex offences has been slashed by more than half.

Ahmed (65) was locked up for five years and six months in January last year for sexually assaulting a young boy and a girl in the 1970s.

The former Rotherham borough councillor — who was jailed for 12 weeks in 2009 for texting moments before he was involved in a fatal crash — was sentenced to three years and six months for one count of buggery and a further two years for two counts of attempted rape.

He had stepped down from the House of Lords just 13 months earlier over sexual misconduct.

One of Ahmed’s victims, who was primary school-aged at the time, said the abuse he had suffered as a child had left him feeling ashamed and suicidal.

But the Court of Appeal ruled last Friday that his Ahmed’s prison time should be reduced by three years after ruling the sentence for buggery was “manifestly excessive” as Ahmed was aged 14 at the time and had no previous convictions.

Senior judges decided to cut the sentence for this offence to six months’ imprisonment, giving a total of two-and-a-half years.

It could mean that with good behaviour, Ahmed, of East Bawtry Road, may be released in the spring, although he must then spend two years on licence and sign on the sex offenders’ register until 2032.

Ahmed’s lawyers successfully argued at the Court of Appeal that Judge Nicholas Lavender “did not give sufficient weight to the applicant’s age and immaturity” when sentencing him for buggery.

In their formal judgment, the Appeal Court judges said: “It is necessary to consider the likely sentence at the time of the offending, without reference to modern levels of sentencing.

“If the applicant had been sentenced shortly after the (buggery) offence, the court would have been dealing with a child of 14, with no previous convictions, for a single offence of buggery.

“The judge was confident that such a court would have decided that neither custody for up to six months, nor any other lawful way of dealing with the applicant, was suitable.

“In the circumstances of this case, we do not agree.

“In our view, whilst the case might have been regarded as coming close to the borderline, a custodial sentence of six months would probably have been regarded as a suitable penalty.

“Had the judge come to that conclusion, he could have considered whether it was appropriate to increase the term of six months to reflect the purposes of sentencing applicable to an adult.

“He did not, however, indicate any reason why he might have done so, and we can see none.”

Ahmed’s two older brothers, Mohammed Farouq and Mohammed Tariq, who both have dementia, were also charged in relation to the male victim.

They were both been declared medically unfit to plead, but a jury found they had also sexually abused the boy.

Farouq and Tariq were given an absolute discharge after Judge Lavender ruled out the alternative legal options of a hospital order and a supervision order.

Judge Lavender said: “It is a terrible thing for anyone to commit crimes of this nature against children.”

Ahmed stepped down from the House of Lords in 2020 but he still has the legal right to his title and has not lost his peerage.

A petition was launched by Rother Valley MP Alexander Stafford to remove the honour — backed by Rotherham MP Sarah Champion.