Man convicted after posing as teen on Snapchat to rape girl

Abdul Khan was convicted at Nottingham Crown Court after prosecutors said he posed as a 14-year-old boy on Snapchat, groomed a 13-year-old girl and lured her to Clifton woods in Nottinghamshire, where he raped her. The jury took four hours to return guilty verdicts against the 28-year-old asylum seeker.

Khan denied rape and the other charges, but the court found him guilty of rape, sexual communication with a child, meeting a child after grooming and perverting the course of justice. The sequence of the case was stark: a profile that appeared to belong to a peer, private messages that built trust, and a meeting in a wooded area that gave the offender privacy and the child little chance to escape.

That path from screen to assault is what makes the case so important for child protection. Snapchat was not just the setting for the grooming, but the tool that let Khan present himself as a teenager and lower a child’s guard before arranging the meeting. For parents, schools and youth workers, the warning signs are in the change of behavior that often comes first: secretive messaging, a new contact who claims to be the same age, and pressure to meet somewhere out of sight.

The broader public-health picture is equally troubling. Rape Crisis England and Wales says one in six children in the UK experience some form of child sexual abuse, a figure that places online grooming in the middle of a wider safeguarding crisis, not on the fringes of it. Cases like Khan’s show how quickly a child’s phone can become the first point of contact in abuse that later moves into parks, woods and other places chosen for isolation.

Khan was due to be sentenced on Tuesday, March 25. For Nottinghamshire, the verdict leaves a familiar task in sharper focus: spotting deception early, reporting suspicious profiles quickly and treating a request to meet in person as a serious danger before a child is ever taken into the woods.