Imran Ahmad Khan: Sex assault claim not taken seriously, jury told

An allegation a prospective Conservative MP had sexually assaulted a 15-year-old boy at a party was not taken "very seriously", a court heard.

Imran Ahmad Khan, 48, is accused of groping the boy at a house in Staffordshire in January 2008.

The alleged victim said he when told a Tory press officer he was going to the police she replied 'Well, you do that'.

Wakefield MP Mr Khan, who is on trial at Southwark Crown Court, denies one charge of sexual assault.

Mr Khan, who was 34 at the time, is said to have forced the teenager to drink gin and tonic, dragged him upstairs and asked him to watch pornography before groping him in a bunk bed.

A police report was made at the time, but the boy did not want to make a formal complaint, a jury has heard.

Giving evidence the alleged victim said he contacted the Conservative party in 2019 after learning Mr Khan was standing in the general election, saying "it all came flooding back".

"I wasn't taken very seriously," he said.

"I explained that Imran Khan was running for MP and had just sort of been hurriedly put through.

"I explained this and said 'He sexually assaulted me when I was a child, when I was 15'."

He said the woman he spoke to sounded "shocked" and passed him on to someone else who sounded more "stern" and asked if he had any "proof".

"I said 'Yes, there's a police report' and she said 'Well...', and that was it.

"I said 'I'm going to the police', and she said 'Well, you do that'."

The court heard the witness, who voted Labour, contacted police shortly after Mr Khan won his seat in Wakefield, but said it was "not motivated by political reasons".

The alleged victim's mother said Mr Khan had seemed like a "very charming man" who she believed was "foreign royalty", while she described her son as an "absolutely joyous boy" who she had tried to bring up in an "Enid Blyton existence".

Later she wept as she told jurors: "I will never, for as long as I live, forget this: [My son] just shaking and shaking and shaking.

"I couldn't get any sense out of him. I just grabbed him and tried to calm him and stop him shaking.

"He was speaking in hushed tones and was just saying 'He was trying to feel me, he was trying to feel me'."

Mr Khan claims he only touched the teenager's elbow when he "became extremely upset" after a conversation about his confused sexuality.

His barrister, Gudrun Young QC, suggested in cross-examination the complainant had given three "contradictory" accounts - a police report in 2008, and police interviews in 2019 and 2021.

She suggested the man, who has trained as an actor, is "literally making this up" but the alleged victim told the court: "I am not a liar."

The trial continues.

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