Asylum seekers ‘laughed while filming themselves raping woman on Brighton beach’
Two asylum seekers repeatedly raped a woman on Brighton beach while a third filmed the ‘predatory and callous’ attack, a court has heard.
Karin Al-Danasurt, 20, Ibrahim Alshafe, 25, and Abdulla Ahmadi, 26, allegedly targeted the woman in the early hours of October 4 last year, after she became separated from her friends while on a night out.
After spotting her staggering in the street, barely able to stand, the trio took her behind a beach shack and attacked her several times, Hove Crown Court heard.
The woman later told police she recalled being spat on, kicked, and her throat being grabbed during the attack, as well as men laughing, jurors were told.
Al-Danasurt is accused of filming the alleged attack, later sending recordings to Ahmadi’s phone.
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All three men knew each other and lived at the same Home Office-approved asylum seeker accommodation at the Cisswood House Hotel in Horsham, West Sussex, jurors were told.
Egyptian Alshafe and Iranian Ahmadi both entered the UK via small boat on June 19, 2025, three months before the alleged rapes, the court heard.
Al-Danasurt, also an Egyptian national, 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’.
‘Frankly, to these defendants, the complainant was meat,’ she said.
‘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.’
The complainant was ‘staggering in the street’ alone when she was approached by the three men, the court heard.
‘Instead of offering her help or even just leaving her be, these defendants targeted her,’ Ms Llewellyn-Waters said.
‘That targeting was not founded in good will or bonhomie, in high spirits – it was cynical, predatory and callous.
‘Al-Danasurt himself in his police interview recognised that she was unable to even stand without support,’ the prosecutor added.
Alshafe and Ahmadi took the complainant to a location behind a beach shack which obscured the view on to the beach and raped the woman ‘repeatedly’, jurors were told.
‘Mr Al-Danasurt went on to that beach moments after his friends took the complainant to the location,’ Ms Llewellyn-Waters said.
Although the complainant could not be definitive as to whether she was also raped by Al-Danasurt, the prosecution alleges Al-Danasurt was present and ‘fully aware of what was happening’.
‘His presence and actions served to encourage the commission of those rapes by his co-defendants,’ Ms Llewellyn-Waters told jurors.
‘Again, footage retrieved from his telephone shows that he filmed the complainant being raped by Alshafe and Ahmadi.’
Jurors were told they would be shown the footage during the course of the trial.
After the alleged attack, the complainant ‘crawled off the beach’ and was captured on CCTV coming up the ramp to the esplanade alongside Alshafe, the prosecutor added.
‘Google translate entered into his telephone within a couple of minutes of them coming into shot details him telling her to “unlock it”, presumably her phone, and, far from wanting to give him her number, she told him to “f*** off”,’ Ms Llewellyn-Waters told jurors.
Ahmadi, from Crewe in Cheshire, and Alshafe, who lives in Horsham, have each denied two counts of raping the woman.
Al-Danasurt, also from Horsham, is jointly charged on all four counts of rape as a secondary party ‘encouraging the rape by his actions at the scene, including filming it’, and has pleaded not guilty to all four.
He denies a fifth count of ‘sharing intimate films’ without the complainant’s consent.
The trial continues.
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