Asylum seekers found guilty of raping a woman on a beach in ‘callous attack’
Three men have been found guilty of raping a woman on a beach in Brighton after she became separated from her friends on a night out.
Asylum seekers Ibrahim Alshafe, 25, Abdulla Ahmadi, 26, and Karin Al-Danasurt, 20, attacked the woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, in the early hours of October 4 last year.
During a trial at Hove Crown Court, prosecutors said Alshafe and Ahmadi repeatedly raped the woman while Al-Danasurt filmed the attack.
All three men knew each other and lived at the same Home Office-approved asylum seeker accommodation in Horsham, West Sussex, jurors were told.
Alshafe and Ahmadi both entered the UK via small boat on June 19, 2025, three months before the alleged rapes, the court heard.
Al-Danasurt entered the country on October 11, 2024.
Prosecutor Hanna Llewellyn-Waters told jurors the complainant was intoxicated at the time and ‘to all intents and purposes, incapacitated’.
During the trial, the victim told the court she remembered being given drinks by an Asian man, before being sick in the toilet.
She then said she woke up on the beach and feared she was going to die.
Footage shown to jurors shows Alshafe smiling and sticking his tongue out during the attack, as well as slapping the woman in the face.
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He and Ahmadi had claimed during the trial the encounter was consensual and that she had approached them along the seafront, kissed and touched them both, said something about sex and took them both to the beach.
Al-Danasurt, who claimed to jurors he tried to stop the attack by filming it, also denied he spat in the woman’s mouth and called her a ‘dirty bitch.’
The woman previously told the court the attack was not consensual, telling the court: ‘I was begging them to stop, and they wouldn’t stop, and I kept saying please stop … and they was laughing at me, and they thought it was funny.’
The alleged victim wept as she told jurors: ‘It wasn’t consensual at all, they (the defendants) ruined my life, they literally ruined my whole life, every day it bothers me, every day I can’t sleep.
‘Every day I do get to sleep, when I do close my eyes, if it’s not one of their faces it’s (the sound of) the seagulls or the waves, and they’re tormenting me.’
She said she had been at a bar with friends until around 3am before going to a nightclub near the beach, the court heard.
‘I remember taking drinks off this Asian man but then I remember being on my hands and knees in the toilet being sick…’ the alleged victim said. ‘After that I don’t remember anything.’
Prosecutors said the three defendants approached the complainant when she was ‘staggering in the street’ alone before attacking her on a beach.
Llewellyn-Waters had told jurors: ‘Frankly, to these defendants, the complainant was meat.
‘She was repeatedly abused for their sexual gratification and entertainment.
‘They wanted sex and that could be achieved by being with someone who was in no state to resist them.’
She said the woman told police she recalled being spat on, kicked, and her throat being grabbed during the attack, as well as men laughing.
The court also heard minutes after leaving the men, the woman spoke to her friends and was described as ‘wailing and hysterical saying she has been raped’.
DNA samples were taken from all three defendants, and DNA from both Alshafe and Ahmadi matched with samples taken from the complainant’s body during a forensic medical examination, while Al-Danasurt’s was inconclusive.
At the time of the incident, all three defendants knew each other and were living at Home Office-approved hotel accommodation for asylum seekers near Horsham, West Sussex.
The court heard Ahmadi and Alshafe met each other on a small boat from France arriving in the UK on June 19 2025, while Alshafe and Al-Danasurt were roommates at the hotel.
Al-Danasurt arrived in the UK on September 21, 2024.
Jurors heard Alshafe’s asylum application had been refused on October 3, but he told the court he did not know about the update to his case before going to Brighton that night.
Ahmadi left the hotel the day after the rape and moved to an address in Crewe, Cheshire, where he was arrested on October 12, the court heard.
The move had not been approved by the Home Office and Ahmadi had been marked as “absconding, self-departing” from the accommodation.
On October 13, Alshafe and Al-Danasurt, both of Lower Beeding, near Horsham, were arrested by police at their hotel.
The men each denied two counts of raping her, but today were convicted at the Crown Court following a trial.
Egyptian national Alshafe and Iranian national Ahmadi were both found guilty of two counts of rape by jurors on Thursday.
Egyptian Al-Danasurt was also found guilty of all four counts of rape as a secondary party by encouraging and filming the ordeal.
Jurors returned their verdicts in the five-week trial after more than 12 hours of deliberation.
A further count of ‘sharing intimate films’ without the complainant’s consent which Al-Danasurt faced was withdrawn on Thursday April 23 after it was established the offence can only be tried in a magistrates’ court.
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