Crispin Blunt MP, an openly gay Tory MP, defended his “friend,” Imran Ahmad Khan MP, after he was convicted of molesting a 15-year-old boy after getting the minor drunk. Blunt later retracted his statement after a backlash.
Ahmad Khan, 48, was convicted on Monday of sexually assaulting a then-15-year-old boy at a party in 2008. The complainant, now 29, told the court that Ahmad Khan said he was a “good-looking boy,” and had been “slow caressing” him after he plied the teenager with alcohol. He said that the MP for Wakefield did not stop after he was told to do so, and proceeded to molest him further.
In prosecution statements, the victim’s parents cried while describing how the attack had left their son “shaking” and “inconsolable.”
A third man told prosecutors that Ahmad Khan, while sharing a guesthouse in Peshawar in northwest Pakistan, had given him a sleeping pill, and that the man woke up to find the MP performing a “sex act” on him.
The man said that he did not go to the police in Pakistan because of his “powerful connections” in the military and government of the country, although the British High Commission and Foreign Office had been informed.
The Tory MP came out as gay during the trial, after an initial attempt to have the case heard anonymously failed, with his lawyers arguing that given both homosexuality and alcoholism are forbidden under his religion, exposing the facts in the case would pose “a risk to his safety both here and abroad.”
His paternal family comes from the northwest of Pakistan, where “male adolescent concubinage,” also known as “bacha bhazi,” is practiced.
Following his conviction, Crispin Blunt, a fellow gay Tory MP, who sat as the chair for the All Party Parliamentary Group on LGBT+ Global Rights, defended his “friend and colleague,” saying that his conviction was a “dreadful miscarriage of justice,” and “nothing short of an international scandal, with dreadful wider implications for millions of LGBT+ muslims around the world.”
Blunt, who sat through some of the trial, but crucially not the prosecution arguments, said that “the conduct of the case relied on lazy tropes about LGBT+ people,” and that if Ahmad Khan did not stay on as an MP, would be “a stain on [the UK’s] reputation for justice, and an appalling own goal by Britain as we try to take a lead in reversing the Victorian era prejudice that still disfigures too much of the global statute book.”
After Blunt’s defence of Ahmad Khan, several MPs on the APPG group that he chaired resigned or threatened to do so, with Labour MP Chris Bryant describing the statement from him as being “completely inappropriate.”
A spokesman for Conservative central office added that the party, who suspended Ahmad Khan after his conviction, rejects “any allegations of impropriety against our independent judiciary, the jury or Mr Khan’s victim.”
Blunt retracted his statement on Tuesday, following the backlash, and resigned as chair of the APPG. “I am sorry that my defence of him has been a cause of significant upset and concern not least to victims of sexual offences,” Blunt said.
“To be clear I do not condone any form of abuse and I strongly believe in the independence and integrity of the justice system.”
