Rotherham child sexual exploitation trial jury retires for the day

A jury considering verdicts of five men and two women charged with offences relating to alleged child sexual exploitation in Rotherham has retired for the day.

For two months Sheffield Crown Court has heard allegations that teenage girls in the South Yorkshire town were repeatedly raped, beaten, passed between abusers and used as prostitutes.

The jury has been told how one girl was locked in a house for weeks as she was forced to have sex with a succession of Asian men.

The court has also heard how a 12-year-old girl was forced to perform sex acts with a group of men in a car after she was picked up from a children's home, how another girl was called a "white bitch and trash" after she was forced to have oral sex, and the mother of one alleged victim was threatened with her house being firebombed.

At the beginning of the trial prosecutor Michelle Colborne QC told the jury they will hear from women who were "targeted, sexualised and in some instances subjected to acts of a degrading and violent nature" when they were teenagers.

She said a number of these girls got pregnant during the abuse. Some were living in children's homes where, in one case, "seemingly no one was interested in whether she returned in a bloodied state".

Arshid Hussain, 40, Qurban Ali, 53, Majid Bostan, 37, Sajid Bostan, 38, Basharat Hussain, 39, Karen MacGregor, 58, and Shelley Davies, 40, all deny a range of charges.

The jury will continue its deliberations at 10am on Thursday.