Three asylum seekers have been found guilty of raping a woman on Brighton beach in a “cynical, predatory and callous” attack after she became separated from her friends on a night out.
A trial at Hove Crown Court heard the woman was targeted by the men as she was “staggering in the street” and was “incapacitated” in the early hours of October 4 last year.
Two of the men took her behind a beach hut in the East Sussex city where they raped her, and the other went to the location moments later and filmed it.
Egyptian national Ibrahim Alshafe, 25, and Iranian national Abdulla Ahmadi, 26, were both found guilty of two counts of rape by jurors on Thursday.
Egyptian national Karin Al-Danasurt, 20, 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.
Footage shown to jurors shows Alshafe smiling during the attack.
He and Ahmadi had claimed during the trial that 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 that he used derogatory language toward the complainant.
Prosecutor Hanna Llewellyn-Waters KC had told jurors the woman recalled being spat on, kicked, and her throat being grabbed during the attack, as well as men laughing.
Giving evidence in the trial, the woman told the court: “It wasn’t consensual, it was not consensual, they are evil and they have ruined my life.”
Being cross-examined from behind a screen in court, she also cried as she said: “It’s the filmer’s face I see every time I close my eyes, laughing at me.”
In a video police interview played to jurors, recorded on October 13 2025, the victim said she had been at a bar with friends until around 3am before going to a nightclub near the beach.
She said she regained consciousness lying on the beach and thought she was going to be killed.
In the recording, she said: “I closed my eyes because I thought ‘oh my God, they’re actually going to kill me’, I can hear all these voices and I can’t stop them.”
The court also heard that 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.
The trio got ready at the hotel before getting the bus to Brighton on the night of October 3.
A Snapchat video shows them at around 7.30pm at the hotel in front of a mirror with Ahmadi sorting a durag – a close-fitting cloth tied around the top of the head – on Al-Danasurt, who gestures to the camera, filmed by Alshafe smiling.
Earlier on the night out, the friends went to a bar and nightclub on the beach where Alshafe was chatting to a woman via Google Translate about his hopes to marry a woman and have children and get citizenship in the UK.
The prosecution suggested that Alshafe had been knocked back by several women and was “on the prowl” with the co-defendants.
“That night, Mr Alshafe, you were nothing more than a nasty little predator,” Ms Llewellyn-Waters said to him in court.
After the attack, the men returned to their hotel by bus and later had a barbecue together in the evening. Around the same time, the woman was waiting to be medically examined.
A video of Al-Danasurt wearing filtered sunglasses in a selfie with a lit barbecue was also shown in court.
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.
A further count of “sharing intimate films” without the complainant’s consent, which Al-Danasurt faced, was withdrawn on April 23 after it was established that the offence can only be tried in a magistrates’ court.
