'Hugely wasted opportunity' Where past inquiries into grooming gangs fell short

In late 2012, Samantha Walker-Roberts took a Megabus from Manchester to London. In an airless room in Westminster, she told Keith Vaz, then chair of the home affairs select committee, her story.

- Geraldine McKelvie

In October 2006, aged 12, she had gone to a police station in Oldham, Greater Manchester, to report that she had been sexually assaulted in a graveyard. Staff at the station were dismissive, she told Vaz, and encouraged her to accept a lift home from two men loitering near the doorway. She ended the night in a detached house in a quiet cul-de-sac, where multiple men took turns to rape and abuse her.

Vaz, a former Labour MP, had been tasked with investigating "localised grooming" - gangs of men preying on teenagers in certain towns and cities across England. Despite a fear that men of South Asian origin were overrepresented, Walker-Roberts recalls being attacked by men of various ethnicities. Her case was sent to a new child sexual exploitation taskforce called Operation Messenger. A string of failings meant just one man - Shakil Chowdhury, a British citizen born in Bangladesh - was convicted.

Appearing at the same inquiry, Peter Fahy, then chief constable of Greater Manchester police, insisted the force had a "very good record" in "dealing with vulnerable victims". He added: "We have long had operations against things like child prostitution - Operation Messenger in places like Oldham."

Fahy tempered his comments by saying he was "angry" that some people "got away with offending longer than we would have liked". He was asked about an investigation into gangs of Pakistani men abusing girls in neighbouring Rochdale, later the focus of the BBC drama Three Girls. Nine men had just been convicted of raping and trafficking white teenagers in the town. The prosecution was the reversal of an earlier decision, made in 2008, which concluded that one of the victims was not a credible witness.

Fahy also rejected claims the force was reluctant to act on cases such as Rochdale because of the ethnicity of the perpetrators.