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  Shame is an issue, says Mohan Singh, head of the Sikh Awareness SocietyTimes photographer, Paul Rogers

Outrage over a hidden pattern of sex grooming triggered a mob attack on a restaurant and fears of escalating tension between Sikh and Muslim communities.

The restaurant targeted during vigilante action in Leicester was loosely linked to the abuse of a 16-year-old Sikh girl by a group of Muslim men.

Six adults were jailed on Friday for offences against the teenager including internal trafficking, facilitating child prostitution, inciting child pornography and paying for the sexual services of a child.

Their prosecution is thought to be the first in which a sex-grooming network has been convicted of crimes against a Sikh victim. Recent trials have exposed the abuse of white girls by street-grooming rings, mostly of Pakistani origin. Campaigners claim that child protection authorities have failed to recognise a similar targeting of Sikh children.

The crime model is under-reported, they say, partly due to the shame felt by Sikh families whose children fall victim to grooming gangs, but also because concerns are often mistakenly dismissed by agencies as “Sikhs complaining because they don’t like their daughter having a Muslim boyfriend”.

Early this year, word spread within Sikh communities about the case that led to last week’s sentencing. Rumours falsely suggested that police knew that a Sikh girl was being used for sex by Muslims but were refusing to intervene.The reality, said Detective Superintendent David Sandall, head of safeguarding at Leicestershire Constabulary, was that an inquiry had been launched but the 16-year-old victim had not yet given police a filmed interview.

In January, 50 Sikh men, some carrying knives, metal bars and bricks, attacked the Moghul Durbar restaurant in Leicester. Some of the girl’s abuse took place in a flat attached to the premises. Innocent staff and diners were attacked, three of them stabbed, and the restaurant was ransacked.

Seven men from Derby and Birmingham, of previous good character, were jailed for two years each for violent disorder. A judge described the attack as “mob rule” and “lawless anarchy”.

Their anger was fuelled by concern over the handling of previous cases. Last year, The Times visited a Sikh family in the West Midlands whose pleas for help from police and social services fell on deaf ears. Mohan Singh, head of the Sikh Awareness Society, travels the country to give public talks about the issue. His organisation runs a helpline and is dealing with 19 current cases around the country.“We have dealt with 600 cases over 15 years. In the 50 worst cases it was more than one man, all of them Muslims,” he said. “Shame is a major issue. People don’t want to go to the police so they come to us.”

Most child-sex offenders in Britain are white men, usually acting alone, but there are perpetrators from all religious backgrounds including Christians, Hindus and Sikhs. Muslims have, however, been significantly over-represented among networks convicted in recent years of street-grooming crimes against teenagers.

Five of the six men convicted last week in Leicester were Muslim and one was Hindu. Ashish Joshi, chairman of the Sikh Media Monitoring Group, said such gangs typically targeted girls “from outside their community”. He added: “They go for white, Sikh or Hindu girls because a small sub-section of the Muslim community holds the prejudiced view that non-Muslim girls are not to be respected like girls from their own community.”

In a BBC One film to be shown this evening, Sikh girls speak of being groomed for abuse by Muslims. who at first posed as Sikhs to win their trust.

Also interviewed is Ibrahim Mogra, assistant secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, who says that such crimes are abhorrent but warns that “unsubstantiated allegations” about the targeting of Sikh children may cause “tensions between our communities”. It was “very wrong for society to blame a whole community”.

Inside Out, a special investigation into the exploitation of Sikh girls, will be shown at 7.30pm. The full half-hour film will be broadcast nationally on BBC One HD and regionally on BBC One London. A shorter version will be shown in other areas of the country.