Afghan national, 28, charged with raping two 14-year-old girls in Manchester
An Afghan national has been charged with raping two 14-year-old girls at a flat in Manchester, days after two 17-year-olds were jailed for the horrific rape of a teen.
An Afghan national has been charged with raping two 14-year-old girls at a flat in Manchester in the UK.
It comes just days after two 17-year-old Afghan refugees were jailed for the horrific rape of a 15-year-old girl at a park in central England.
Sultani Bakatash, 28, has been charged with two counts of rape of a girl under 16, one count of sexual assault, and one count of assault by penetration, Greater Manchester Police said on Tuesday.
Bakatash appeared at Manchester Magistrates’ Court where he was remanded in custody after a brief hearing via an interpreter of the Dari language spoken in Afghanistan, ITV reported.
The court heard Bakatash has been in the UK for two years and has been granted indefinite leave to remain. His mother, two brothers and two sisters are also living in the UK.
A bail application made by Bakatash’s solicitor was opposed by the prosecutor and refused by the court.
“These are indictable only offences, so we are sending your case to the Crown Court at Bolton on the 13th of January, 2026,” Mary Cash, chairwoman of the bench, told the defendant, per ITV.
Bakatash was arrested in the early hours of Sunday after a report of a rape at a flat in the Middle Hulton area of Bolton, a town of about 184,000 people 30 minutes northwest of Manchester city centre.
Police allege Bakatash had previously been in online contact with the girls before meeting them.
Both girls are being supported by specialist teams as officers continue to investigate the full circumstances of the incident.
Police say are not looking for anyone else in connection with the incident.
“This is a deeply concerning report, and our priority is supporting the two young girls and their families at this traumatic time,” Greater Manchester Police chief superintendent Helen Critchley, Bolton district commander, said in a statement.
“We have acted quickly since this was reported to us in the last 48 hours, and we’ve been using all available resources to understand what has happened and help this case progress through court.
“We remain firmly committed to protecting young girls in Bolton and across Greater Manchester and to help people feel safe in their neighbourhood. I ask that the public continue to support us while we do whatever is necessary to support the girls and to get this case solved.
“As criminal proceedings are now active, I urge the public not to speculate so that the legal process can take its proper course and the dignity of the girls is maintained.”
‘Cultural differences’
On Monday, Jan Jahanzeb and Israr Niazal, both aged 17, were sentenced to youth detention terms of 10 years and eight months and nine years and 10 months respectively for the rape of a 15-year-old girl at a park in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, in central England’s West Midlands in May this year.
They arrived in the UK as unaccompanied minors by crossing over the Channel.
The 17-year-olds were living in taxpayer-funded supported accommodation in the Warwickshire town at the time of the horror.
The victim recorded the attack, but the footage is so harrowing it would trigger a riot if published, one of the defence lawyers said.
Her attackers both admitted a single charge of rape of a child under 16 when they appeared before magistrates in Coventry in October.
Jahanzeb turns 18 in less than a month and will be automatically deported after serving his sentence. The court heard his date of birth is unknown, so an “age assessment” was carried out by specialists.
He made three failed attempts to cross the Channel — including two when his boat was cut up by French police — before succeeding on the fourth try in January.
Niazal pleaded guilty to the rape a day before he turned 17 — meaning he cannot be automatically deported. He is still awaiting the outcome of his asylum claim, having arrived in the UK in November last year.
His barrister, Joshua Radcliffe, suggested “cultural differences” were to blame.
“He is not used to a society where women are free and deemed equal to men,” he said. “He is not used to a society where alcohol is freely available. He is morally at sea. There are massive cultural barriers that have become massive moral barriers.”
Mr Radcliffe added that Niazal may still be able to “make a life for himself in this country” when he is released.
Judge Sylvia de Bertodano lifted reporting restrictions banning the media from naming the pair at Warwick Crown Court this week.
Barristers for Jahanzeb and Niazal had unsuccessfully tried to stop their names being made public, saying it could lead to “widespread public disorder”.
Judge de Bertodano told the Afghan defendants they had “robbed” the girl of her childhood.
She said the footage recorded on the teen’s phone was “highly distressing to watch”.
Addressing the cultural differences between the UK and Afghanistan, the judge said, “I accept that you come from a place which has significant cultural differences to the UK. However I do not accept that either of you does not understand the concept of consent.”
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said the defence argument in the Warwickshire case was “exactly the reason they shouldn’t be here in the first place, as I have said for years”.
“If you as a country allow young men who come from countries in which women aren’t even classed as second-class citizens and you put them up in four-star hotels, allow them to work illegally … their attitude towards women is completely different to ours, so the social effects of this are appalling as well,” he said in a video on social media.
Foreign nationals are responsible for more than one quarter of sexual assaults on women successfully prosecuted in the UK, official figures revealed earlier this year.
Data from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), obtained under freedom-of-information laws, showed 26 per cent of the 1453 sexual assault convictions in 2024 were of foreign nationals, The Telegraph reported.
Indians accounted for the highest number of sexual assaults on women by foreign nationality, followed by Romanians, Poles, Pakistanis and Afghans.
The number of sexual offence convictions of foreign nationals has increased by 62 per cent in four years, additional MoJ data obtained in August revealed.
Record numbers of foreign sex offenders and violent criminals are now being held in jails in England and Wales.
Former Prime Minister Liz Truss said: “These horrific crimes are happening daily in Britain.
The whole system, including the mainstream media, is suppressing the truth.
The Human Rights Act needs to be repealed. All migration from Afghanistan should be stopped.”
Political commentator Annabel Denham, writing in The Telegraph on Tuesday, said the vast numbers of men flooding into the UK by small boats across the Channel posted a “clear risk to public safety”.
“In their tens of thousands, people are boarding overloaded dinghies to voyage from a safe country to British shores outside of any authorised process,” she wrote.
“So it should hardly shock us if many people with this attitude to the law go on to commit other offences.
“Over just six months the media — not the police, Home Office or Border Force — have informed the public of 339 criminal charges linked to residents of asylum hotels.
“In June, an illegal migrant was convicted of raping a 20-year-old woman in a churchyard. Last month, an Afghan pleaded guilty to raping a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton. Just this week, two Afghan teenagers who had crossed the Channel on small boats were convicted of raping a 15-year old schoolgirl.
“These are not isolated incidents, but avoidable horrors.
“No system designed for thousands can cope with tens of thousands, year after year, whoever is running the country.
“In 2010, Britain received 17,900 asylum applications: by 2015 this had risen to 32,700; today it exceeds 110,000.
“And whilst small boats are the most visible demonstration of this broken system they are not the only one: in the year to June 2025 14,800 people on student visas claimed asylum — nearly 70 per cent from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.”
— with The Sun
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Originally published as Afghan national, 28, charged with raping two 14-year-old girls in Manchester
