Three men convicted of grooming and sexually exploiting a vulnerable teenage girl jeered and swore at the victim as they were jailed.
Hamdulluh Hamdadd, 24, and Rafiullah Naseri, 21, both of Hull, were found guilty of child sexual exploitation and paying for the sexual services of a child, while Amjid Akakhail, 22, of Wakefield, was found guilty of paying for sexual services of a child following a trial at Hull Crown Court.
Hamdadd and Naseri were each sentenced to eight years in prison and Akakhail to four years in prison.
Det Insp Tim Hudson, of Humberside Police, said it was a “harrowing example of grooming and manipulatively controlled predatory behaviour”.
In mitigation, the defendant’s counsel asked the judge to take into account the ages of the accused – all under 25 – and background, with all three men arriving in the UK as asylum seekers.
Humberside Police said all three men were Afghan nationals.
The court heard how the girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was 16 when she met Hamdadd in a shop in Hull, and was 17 when the alleged offences took place between September and December 2025.
Judge Alex Menary said the girl, who he described as a “vulnerable runaway teen”, was known to regularly go missing – and said she was with the men at the times she had disappeared.
He said she “did not know how to break the cycle” of the grooming, which gave her an escape from the “unhappy” setting she was living in and they had “used the victim in a most disparaging and degrading way”.
The court heard how Hamdadd and Naseri would ply the girl with “alcohol and other drugs” in order to get her to stay with the men, where they would solicit her for sex with other men, including Akakhail.
As the men were led out of the dock, Hamdadd leaned across and made rude gestures and shouted at the victim, who was sitting in the public gallery.
Naseri smiled and laughed throughout the hearing, and all three men stared intently at the victim throughout the proceedings.