⚠️ Content Warning: This article contains descriptions of sexual abuse and rape. Reader discretion is advised.
He told them he had supernatural powers. He used that lie to destroy their childhoods.
Abdul Halim Khan walked into those girls’ lives wearing a robe of religious authority. He left them with wounds that no court sentence can fully heal.
A judge handed the 54-year-old East London imam a life sentence this week — with a minimum term of 20 years — after a jury convicted him of nine counts of rape and multiple counts of sexual assault and child abuse. Seven victims. Eleven years. One man who weaponised faith to commit unspeakable harm.
Khan ran his operation with calculated precision. He positioned himself as a respected mosque healer, approaching Muslim families and convincing worried parents that their daughters carried “bad spirits” requiring his special “cure.” Once he gained their trust, he isolated the girls — in cars with tinted windows, private flats, anywhere he could control the environment. There, he raped and sexually abused them while performing the role of a supernatural Jinn. When he finished, he threatened them: speak out, and the cure reverses. Stay silent, or black magic destroys your family.
It worked. For over a decade, it worked.“I genuinely believed he had supernatural powers,” said Aria (not her real name) who was just 13 when Khan first targeted her.
He told her something terrible would happen to her family if she ever spoke. She stayed quiet for years.
Another survivor, Farah, eventually found the courage to tell her parents as a teenager. They did not believe her. They blamed her instead. She left the family home.
“I feel lost,” Farah said. “I question who I am and where I belong.”
Khan’s youngest victim was 12 years old. A school therapist first heard her story in 2018 — but prosecutors did not charge Khan until 2023. Five years passed between a child finally speaking and the law responding.
Crown Prosecution specialist Melissa Garner described the case as unlike anything she had encountered in her career. Khan, she said, “threatened and brainwashed” his victims into believing he held supernatural authority over their lives.
Professor Aisha K Gill, a criminology expert who gave evidence in the case, explained the precise mechanism Khan exploited: religious authority, spiritual fear, and cultural pressure that taught these girls to keep family matters private and to carry shame that belonged entirely to their abuser.
Khan now sits in a prison cell. His victims carry the question Aria still asks herself — who would I have been if this never happened to me?
Farah has a message for every survivor still carrying that same weight in silence:
“Surviving does not make you weak. It reflects strength.”
She is right. And they deserved to be protected long before it came to that.
