How the Lancashire cotton town that was once a cradle of the Industrial Revolution is now terrorised by machete drug gangs

At the end of a timeworn street just north of Rochdale town centre sits a row of red-brick terraced houses, of which all but one appear indistinguishable.

The exception bears a cluster of hi-tech security cameras that wouldn’t look out of place in a bank, for instance, or a police station. And for good reason.

What happened in this two-up, two-down was shocking but sadly typical of the feud then raging between rival organised crime groups (OCGs) that blighted this Greater Manchester town, a once proud textiles powerhouse.

Last week, a court heard that at around 11.40pm on May 22, 2021, two masked men forced their way inside the house and ran up the stairs to where 27-year-old Abbas Mushtaq was asleep in bed.

He woke to find the two men slashing at him with a sword and a machete, swinging the blades from every angle, or so it seemed to Mushtaq, who could only shield his face with his hands. He would later recall his sisters screaming and the sight of ‘blood everywhere’.

Quite possibly Mushtaq’s life was saved by his mother Zahida, who put herself between her son and the attackers. Then she grabbed the sword only for it to be snatched back, wounding Zahida’s wrist in the process.

Still, she fought on. Grappling with the attacker, Zahida seized his arm and the sword ended up ‘stuck in the wall’.

After prising it free, the two men ran away. Critically wounded, Mushtaq spent ten days in hospital and was treated for life-changing injuries to his hands, face and upper body. Some of the cuts went right to the bone while others severed tendons.

An aerial photograph showing Rochdale, in Lancashire, which has been described as ‘like a Mafia TV series’ 

Later that year, one of the attackers, Owais Ali, was jailed for six years for wounding with intent. He was identified as a member of an OCG and it transpired that the attack took place against a background of tit-for-tat warfare.

Last week, justice finally caught up with three others involved when getaway driver Mohammed Hassan Alam, 26, Asad Ali, 31, who ‘orchestrated’ the attack, and his wife Sonia Ali, 34, who ‘directly facilitated’ it, were all jailed at Manchester’s Minshull Street Crown Court. Alam and Asad Ali were also named in court as OCG members.

For the brave detectives who have faced death threats and intimidation from gangsters, last week’s convictions marked a significant victory. Over the past few years, the unit has dismantled the most dominant crime group, the Adam OCG, named after its first drug line and previously thought beyond the reach of the law. In 2023 a detective said the Adam gang ‘pretty much rules Rochdale’.

The unnamed OCG gang behind the attack on Mushtaq has been similarly taken down – as has another OCG linked to Mushtaq himself. For Mushtaq was by no means an innocent.

Five months after he was attacked the Smiler OCG, to which he was affiliated, launched an equally sickening retaliatory assault on getaway driver Alam. On the evening of October 5, 2021, he was driving a VW Golf when it was rammed and flipped three or four times before an ‘armed gang’ surrounded him, wielding a machete, axe, baseball bat, combat knife and chainsaw.

He was hacked at, beaten and slashed before being doused with corrosive ammonia.

In 2023 Abbas Mushtaq was locked up for 16 years for conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm, violent disorder and possession with intent to supply. Other gang members – Taylor Snape, 25, Jake Horrocks, 24, and Naseer Kazmi, 32 – were also jailed.

That year, in a BBC documentary, a detective outlined exactly what his team was up against in Rochdale. Violence had rapidly increased in the previous five years, he said, adding: ‘You will get acid attacks, machete attacks, incidents in which people have been scalped on the street. And almost all extreme violence in the area is linked to gangs.’

Getaway Mohammed Hassan Alam, 26, (pictured) and two accomplices were jailed at Manchester’s Minshull Street Crown Court last week

His accomplice 31-year-old Asad Ali, who ‘orchestrated’ the attack (Pictured)

Ali’s wife Sonia Ali, 34, (pictured) who ‘directly facilitated’ the attack. Alongside Alam, the couple were also jailed

Those living on Mellor Street where Mushtaq was attacked are only too aware.

A nurse told the Daily Mail this week: ‘Sometimes it’s like a Mafia TV series but it’s real. It’s not a nice place to bring up children. I grew up in Rochdale but it’s different now. Community was once everything in this town but it seems to have gone.’

The town is known as the birthplace of the modern co-operative movement. The Rochdale Pioneers were a group of 28 working-class individuals who, in the mid-19th century, created a member-owned shop run according to ethical principles that would be alien to the get-rich-quick gangsters of today.

It is the town’s legacy to UK political and social history – it was once one of the world’s most important centres for cotton processing – that the council hopes will help Rochdale win the 2028 UK Town Of Culture contest which comes with a £3million prize.

Those on the breadline here have more prosaic concerns.

Rochdale, tired and depressed, is one of the most deprived towns in England. And for some it is dangerous. ‘I’m scared to go out at night,’ said the nurse. ‘There was a stabbing near here just the other week that was apparently gang-related.’

Gang warfare is nothing new in Manchester of course. Twenty years ago, when it was dubbed Gunchester, there was a shooting nearly every other day.

Over the years police have drastically reduced gun crime by smashing firearm supply chains and doggedly pursuing the worst offenders. Heftier sentences helped too.

Have their successes forced a switch from bullets to blades?

Detective Inspector Sam Taylor, of Rochdale CID, told the Daily Mail: ‘If you have a firearm in your possession you are going to prison for a long time. We were so on top of it that other weapons are starting to be used a little bit more. But not withstanding that we still seized 23 firearms across Greater Manchester last year.’

One local, a former British Army soldier who lives near Mellor Street, told us: ‘The machete now seems to be the weapon of choice for these gangsters. They think they’re untouchable and chase around in cars and motorbikes. They think nothing of flashing a machete to intimidate or worse.’

Last year, in a depressing initiative, so-called ‘bleed kits’ were placed around Rochdale aimed at saving the lives of stabbing victims. Effectively first-aid kits containing dressings, an emergency tourniquet and a foil blanket, they provide immediate treatment for severe bleeding and are stored in secure cabinets outside buildings, including the police station.

On average it takes an ambulance 17 minutes to reach a patient, it was argued, but bleeding from serious injuries, such as stabbings, can prove fatal in as little as three.

The kits were needed, argued once councillor, because of the ‘worrying and tragic reality’ of knife crime in the town.

By way of vivid illustration, another Mellor Street local shows us footage recorded by the camera on his car dashboard on January 26 at 4.20pm. In it, he drives home along Sheriff Street in daylight and begins to slow at traffic lights ahead. Several cars are in front of him. Suddenly a white Toyota Aygo cuts awkwardly in front of the car ahead of him and it quickly becomes apparent that its driver is being pursued.

As traffic halts, the car is swarmed by motorbikes. One of the men jumps off the back of one of them and holds aloft a machete before slashing at the Toyota with it. Another attacker on the back of another bike then joins in.

Pictured: Drake Street, in Rochdale, Lancashire, where work is taking place to run trams into the town centre

Seconds later, the driver pulls away and escapes. Whether this was yet another retaliatory burst of gang violence is not known. The man who shared it didn’t report it to police because he didn’t want ‘to get involved’.

Who can blame him? It was getting involved that, three miles across town on the Newbold Estate, nearly cost tree surgeon Cameron Brooksbank his left hand. Ultimately it would cost this once happy-go-lucky young man his life.

Late one afternoon in October 2017, Cameron, then 18, and two colleagues had just finished thinning a poplar tree in the back garden of a bungalow on Church Road when they heard an elderly woman being abused for her driving.

Being a gallant sort, Cameron instinctively sprang to her defence. What neither he nor the woman knew was that the man with whom she was arguing was a senior member of the Adam OCG and that Church Road was right at the heart of its powerbase. Cameron tried to act as peacemaker, telling Habibur Rahman, 27, to ‘calm down’.

But a court would later hear that Rahman felt ‘disrespected’ by Cameron’s intervention and summoned around 20 men to his side armed with machetes, knives and claw hammers. At one point Rahman referred to ‘white b******s’ who were in his ‘country’.

One of the mob, Mohammed Awais Sajid, 23 – known as Skinny – pulled an axe from the waistband of his trousers and immediately began attacking the teenager. The first blow struck him in the ribs. It happened so quickly that Cameron initially thought he had been punched.

He told detectives he then ‘felt something warm and wet running down my back and I thought: “Right, I’ve been stabbed.”‘ 

Sajid then swung the axe at his head. The blow was only averted as Cameron raised his left arm to protect himself. His hand was almost completely severed above the wrist. 

Staggering away, he collapsed, drifted in and out of consciousness, and nearly died due to blood loss. The mob dispersed only when one of Cameron’s colleagues started up a chainsaw.

Later surgeons partially reattached Cameron’s hand but he then needed five further operations just to maintain 60 per cent use of his arm.

In addition to being what a judge called a ‘savage and barbaric’ act against ‘a person… acting as a peacemaker’, it was also a clumsy misstep from the Adam OCG. Like Rahman, Sajid was a high-ranking member – and the son of its feared boss, Sajid Hussain. It was unusual, to say the least, for the two men to place themselves at risk of capture.

Sensing a way of dismantling the gang, a team of specialist officers began uncovering a sophisticated criminal network involving major drug-dealing, grooming of children – some as young as 11 – to deal hard drugs, witness intimidation and suspected money-laundering.

Cameron, meanwhile, bravely agreed to give evidence in court despite being offered £10,000 by a suspected gang member to stay silent. Sajid, who had denied a charge of wounding with intent, was jailed for 18 years.

Judge John Potter told Rahman, meanwhile, that he was the instigator of the ‘dreadful, shocking outbreak of violence’ and sentenced him to four and a half years for conspiracy to commit violent disorder.

There was to be a terrible postscript to this appalling attack. Cameron said some months afterwards that it ‘completely changed his life’ and meant he was no longer ‘the same person’. Six years later, after suffering depression, he was found dead with a mix of both prescription drugs and cocaine in his system. A coroner would later conclude that he did not intend to take his life, however.

Last week the Daily Mail visited the Newbold Estate, a mix of prefabricated post-war properties and 1970s-built council homes.

A former British Army soldier, who is also a local, said machetes ‘seem to be the weapon of choice for these gangsters’ (stock image)

A woman who witnessed the axe attack on Cameron told us she is ‘still traumatised’ and continues to receive counselling. ‘It was terrifying, a battleground. That poor innocent lad caught was just trying to help an old lady.’

She recalled how her friend, who lives in the bungalow where Cameron had been working, was threatened in the aftermath of the attack. ‘They wanted the CCTV from the front of her house and said they’d burn her out if they didn’t get it. They only backed off when an intermediary assured them the cameras were duds.’

Another woman told us drugs are dealt openly on a football pitch in the middle of the estate. ‘It can be an intimidating place to live,’ she said. ‘A lot of people are fearful of the consequences if they contact police – that’s how the gangs keep a grip on things.’

For now, the tit-for-tat violence appears to have calmed. DI Taylor told us: ‘Obviously it’s important that we are alive to the fact that once an OCG is dismantled it does create a vacuum for others to fill. We can’t rest on our laurels. It is our job to keep on top of it and maintain the pressure.

‘We need to find out who is filling the vacuum and proactively pursue that as well. We act on information straight away, we’re good at what we do and have really dedicated officers.

‘The people of Rochdale don’t deserve to see gang-related violence on the streets – it’s just something that we are never going to tolerate.’