Brighton beach attack: Woman thought she would die during alleged rape by two asylum seekers
The trial of three asylum seekers accused of a “cynical, predatory and callous” rape on Brighton beach has heard harrowing details of the alleged attack, which the complainant says has left her tormented and unable to sleep.
Karin Al-Danasurt, 20, and Ibrahim Alshafe, 25, both Egyptian nationals, and Abdulla Ahmadi, a 26-year-old Iranian, have each pleaded not guilty to charges relating to the incident in the early hours of October 4, 2025. All three were, at the time, residents of the Home Office-approved Cisswood House Hotel in Lower Beeding, West Sussex.
The Alleged Attack
Prosecutors allege that the men targeted the woman, who cannot be identified, after she became separated from friends during a night out. The court heard she had been at a bar until around 3am before going to a nightclub near the beach.
In a video interview recorded on October 13 last year and played to Hove Crown Court, the woman said her memory was fragmented after becoming sick in a toilet. She recalled “taking drinks off this Asian man” but said “after that I don’t remember anything.” The prosecution alleges the defendants approached her when she was “staggering in the street” alone.
She told jurors that when she regained consciousness she was on the beach. “I closed my eyes because I thought ‘oh my god, they’re actually going to kill me’,” she said in the recording. She described one man being on top of her while another was “spitting at me, he was like holding me down.”
Breaking down in tears while giving evidence from behind a screen on Wednesday, she denied a defence suggestion of consensual sex. “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,” she said.
“It wasn’t consensual at all, they ruined my life, they literally ruined my whole life,” she told the court, adding that she is plagued by nightmares. “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.”
The Charges and Defendants’ Backgrounds
The Crown alleges that Alshafe and Ahmadi repeatedly raped the woman, while Al-Danasurt acted as a secondary party by encouraging the assault through his actions, which included filming it. Al-Danasurt faces an additional charge of sharing intimate films without consent, relating to an allegation he sent recordings of the incident to Ahmadi’s phone shortly afterwards.
Alshafe and Ahmadi each deny two counts of rape. Al-Danasurt has pleaded not guilty to all four rape counts as a secondary party and to the separate film-sharing charge.
The court heard that all three defendants had arrived in the UK via small boats and had pending asylum claims. According to the briefing, Alshafe and Ahmadi entered the UK on June 19, 2025, approximately three months before the alleged attack. Al-Danasurt had arrived earlier, on October 11, 2024.
Ahmadi left the Cisswood House Hotel the day after the alleged rapes, moving to Crewe in Cheshire without Home Office approval, and was subsequently marked as “absconding“. He was arrested in Crewe on October 12, 2025. Alshafe and Al-Danasurt were arrested a day later after returning to the hotel.
Forensic Evidence and Context
The jury has been informed that DNA evidence matched Alshafe and Ahmadi to the complainant. Forensic evidence relating to Al-Danasurt was described as inconclusive.
The accommodation where the defendants were housed, the Cisswood House Hotel, is a 3-star country house hotel with 51 rooms, a spa, pool, and restaurant, previously used as a wedding venue. A note from March 2023 indicated it was then housing only refugee families, who had been moved there at short notice from London.
The trial, which is expected to last four weeks, continues.
