Former Labour Mayor Found Guilty of Hiding Evidence in Son’s Rape Investigation
A former Labour mayor has been convicted of perverting the course of justice after a court found she helped her son hide his mobile phone while police were waiting to arrest him for the rape of a 15-year-old girl.
Naheed Ejaz, 61, who served as the mayor of Bracknell Forest in Berkshire from 2023 to 2024, was found guilty by a jury at Winchester Crown Court on Thursday. The court heard that Ejaz deliberately delayed police officers from entering her home and shouted instructions in Urdu to her son, Diwan Khan, 41, giving him time to conceal a device believed to contain video evidence of the sexual assault.
The incident occurred in the early hours of September 12, 2024, when officers arrived at the family’s shared property in Bracknell to arrest Khan. Prosecutors told the court that Ejaz answered the door but refused to allow the officers inside immediately. Instead, she stalled for “some minutes,” obstructing the police while communicating with her son in a language the officers did not understand.
Prosecutor Ed Wylde told the jury that Ejaz’s actions were a calculated attempt to assist her son in destroying or hiding critical evidence. “We say they were speaking in Urdu so the police wouldn’t know what they were talking about,” Wylde stated. He added that while a mother’s instinct to protect her child is natural, in this instance, “a mother’s love for her son… stretched into criminality.”
Khan, who had served as his mother’s mayoral consort during her term in office, eventually handed a phone to the police. However, the court learned that this was not the device officers were seeking. He had allegedly hidden the phone containing a video recording of the attack on the teenage girl. Khan has pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice regarding the concealment of the phone but denies the charge of rape.
The trial revealed disturbing details regarding the allegations against Khan. He is accused of giving the 15-year-old victim vodka laced with MDMA before raping her while she was incapacitated. The prosecution alleges that the girl woke up naked in the back of his car with no memory of the event, at which point Khan showed her a video he had filmed of the assault to threaten and silence her.
Ejaz, who was celebrated as the borough’s “first Pakistani Muslim mayor,” resigned as a councillor in September 2024, shortly after her son was charged. Her defence had argued that she was unaware of the full extent of the trouble her son was in at the time of the arrest, but the jury rejected this account, convicting her of actively assisting in the cover-up.
Both mother and son are facing sentencing, with the rape trial against Khan continuing. The conviction marks a dramatic fall from grace for the former civic leader, whose term as mayor had been viewed as a milestone for diversity in the region.
* indiatoday.in
* reddit.com
* uknip.co.uk
* opindia.com
* gbnews.com
* express.co.uk
