London:

Seven men who sexually abused two girls two decades ago received hefty jail sentences in the UK on Friday as a result of Britain’s biggest ever investigation into child abuse.

The men were imprisoned for between seven and 25 years after being convicted in June of offences committed in Rotherham, in northern England, in the early 2000s.

The cases stem from the National Crime Agency’s (NCA) Operation Stovewood, a decade-long investigation into child sexual abuse that is the largest of its kind in UK history.

It began in 2014 following the publication of the Jay Report, which sent shockwaves around the country.

It found that at least 1,400 girls were abused, trafficked and groomed by gangs of men of mainly Pakistani heritage in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013.

The report found that police and social services failed to put a stop to the abuse.

Some 36 people have been convicted so far as a result of the operation, according to the NCA, which investigates serious, organised and international crime.

The latest convictions came at the end of a nine-week trial at Sheffield Crown Court.

The trial heard how the victims, who were aged between 11 and 16 at the time of the offences and were both in the care of social services, were groomed and often plied with alcohol or cannabis before being raped or assaulted.

They would often be collected by their abusers from the children’s homes where they lived at the time, the NCA said.

“These men were cruel and manipulative, grooming their victims and then exploiting them by subjecting them to the most harrowing abuse possible,” said NCA senior investigating officer Stuart Cobb.

Rotherham, a once prosperous industrial town that has suffered years of economic decline, experienced some of the worst anti-migrant violence during this summer’s riots in England when hundreds of people attacked a hotel housing asylum-seekers.

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