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 “incapacitated” in the early hours of October 4 last year.
Two of the men took her behind a beach hut in the 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 the woman 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 in court that he had tried to stop the attack by filming it, 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.” 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 police interview filmed nine days after the attack and played to jurors, the victim said she had been at a bar with friends until around 3am before going to a nightclub near the beach. She recalled regaining 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 samples taken from the complainant. Al-Danasurt’s test result was inconclusive.
At the time of the incident, all three defendants, who arrived in England by small boats last year, knew each other and were living at Home Office-approved hotel accommodation for asylum seekers near Horsham, West Sussex.
Jurors heard Alshafe’s asylum application had been refused the day before the attack, but he told the court he did not know about the update to his case before going to Brighton that night.
On the night of 3 October, the three men took a bus to Brighton. The court heard that they 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 he 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. Around the same time, their victim 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 12 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.
