IF THERE is a difference between the legacy and social media, it’s that the former focus almost entirely on the Starmer psychodrama and related issues while in the other (on X, at least) there is as much, if not more, coverage on immigration.
In particular, there has been much coverage of the evils associated with Pakistani (Kashmiri) immigration and the role of Muslims, with special reference to the commentary emerging from Rupert Lowe’s grooming gang inquiry, which has been almost entirely ignored by the legacy media.
That disparity has somewhat changed today with reports in some legacy media sources of two events. The first, detailed in the Telegraph, is the case of 23-year-old Ahmad Mulakhil at Warwick Crown Court, who has been found guilty of raping a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton. He was also convicted of child abduction, two counts of sexual assault and taking indecent photos of a child. He is yet to be sentenced.
Mulakhil arrived in a dinghy from France in March 2025, four months before the attack. The case attracted local anger as the police were up to their usual tricks of not reporting his nationality and immigration status.
The second event is described by the Mail as ‘School stabbing terror probe’. In a classroom at Kingsbury High School in Brent, north-west London, we are told, a teenager pulled out a knife and stabbed a 13-year-old boy in the neck and back while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’, according to witnesses.
Seconds later, a second boy aged 12 was knifed in front of screaming children. A male, who has not been named, has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder. Sources say he was not a pupil at Kingsbury High.
Conveniently, because the suspect is under 18, he will not be named and – as is usual with such matters – his ethnicity will not be revealed. But, since counter-terrorism police were leading the investigation and the boy was said to have screamed ‘Allahu Akbar’, there are good grounds for suspecting that it’s ‘them’ again.
This, though, is not the only immigration story in the Mail. Published on Tuesday but still online are details of another horrendous crime perpetrated by an asylum seeker.
In typical Mail style, the headline tells the full story: ‘He’s an animal who played the system. The public deserves better’. As a Pakistani immigrant is jailed for raping a teen after court covered asylum status up, how one in ten of all claimants now come from the country – and often stay for decades’. (In fact he has not been jailed but was remanded in custody for later sentencing.)
Tom Rawstorne writes that Sheraz Malik, 28, had been in Britain for a year when he raped a vulnerable 18-year-old in a Nottinghamshire park. Afterwards he asked her: ‘Did you enjoy that?’
What marks this out is the story of how Malik came to be in this country in the first place. Having left Pakistan a decade earlier, he apparently embarked on a tour of Europe, taking in Italy, Germany and France. He stayed so long in Italy – three years, according to police sources there – that he learned the language.
And yet, apparently encouraged by two Afghan men who extolled the virtues of the UK as a soft-touch destination for immigrants, it was here he finally ended up. After being smuggled into the country in the back of a car in July 2024, he began playing the system.
After lodging an asylum claim, it is understood that he was first housed in a government-run hotel before being moved into a hostel for immigrants in Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, from which he disappeared for weeks at a time, apparently to work. The rest of his time was spent playing cricket in the local park – where he chanced upon his victim in June last year.
Unsurprisingly, writes Rawstorne, news of Malik’s background sparked outrage following his conviction for two counts of rape last month. But what also emerged was the fact that a judge had stopped the public from being told that he was an asylum seeker by gagging the press from reporting it until the end of his trial.
Equally troubling is that Malik’s journey to the UK, and his use of the nation’s asylum system, has followed an increasingly well-worn path. Official figures show that 110,000 people claimed asylum in the UK in the year to last September, up 13 per cent on 2024. Pakistanis now make up one in ten of all asylum claims, more than any of the 175 other nations from which migrants seek refugee status in the UK. Yet Pakistan is not currently a war-torn hell-hole.
There have been numerous other attacks in recent months involving children and teenagers, when the age bar comes into force and details including resident status and ethnicity are not reported. So normalised are such events that even the more egregious cases only make short-term headlines and quickly disappear from the legacy media.
And there is the difference. While the legacy media dips in and out of these reports, the flame of outrage is being kept burning in the social media, as with Rupert Lowe’s efforts which are getting considerable traction.
One thing Lowe told us on Tuesday was that Britain needs to understand the sophisticated level of co-ordination between the rape gangs.
It goes far deeper than anybody realises, he wrote. These is a national crime network of the most depraved kind, with his inquiry finding evidence of advanced links between dozens of towns and cities. This is not simply dispersed groups of savages, he adds.
This is co-ordinated, right across the country. The tactics are well rehearsed, and well drilled. They know exactly what they are doing. Nothing is off limits to these people – nothing. And there is zero appetite in Westminster or the media to discuss it.
My response to this was that a lot of people do realise and have been saying so for some time – but Lowe, with others, hasn’t been listening. The (largely) Mirpur Kashmiri rape gangs are distinguished from most of those engaged in child sexual exploitation by treating it as structured business enterprises within the matrix of family-orientated crime syndicates (baradari).
Children are groomed and sold on as sex-slaves to associates and customers, but this activity is invariably just one of a suite of criminal activities which most often include drug-dealing (and smuggling), money laundering, tobacco smuggling and wholesale/retail sale of illicit tobacco, visa fraud, people-smuggling and fencing stolen goods (including high-end cars).
The range and depth of these baradari crime syndicates is such that they have penetrated local and national politics, have bribed or corrupted local officials and the police, and have infiltrated public services at local and national levels.
They operate on a cross-border basis, with close ties back to Kashmir and the Pashtun regions of Afghanistan, and are easily equivalent to the Mafia-organised gangs which took root in the United States.
That they remain invisible to government law enforcement agencies, the media and national government, is one of their greatest successes, enabling each of their criminal enterprises to be looked at in isolation – including their organised child sex abuse. But the so-called grooming gangs are just the tip of a huge criminal iceberg which operates freely in our midst and almost completely escapes notice.
At least this is now getting said, and we even have a weak piece in the Times from Paul Goodman telling us that ‘Islamist hate has gone unchallenged for too long’. With extremism in British mosques and signs of sectarianism growing, government urgently needs to get a grip on the problem, he writes.
Government needs to do a lot more than that – but of course it won’t. And neither will the legacy media. But the flame of anger is burning very bright, and it isn’t going to stay confined to social media for ever.
This article appeared in Turbulent Times on February 11, 2026, and is republished by kind permission.