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Three men have been found guilty of repeatedly raping a woman on Brighton beach in a “cynical, predatory and callous” attack after she became separated from her friends on a night out.
The woman was targeted by the men as she was incapacitated in the early hours of 4 October last year, the trial at Hove crown court was told.
Two of the men took her behind a beach hut where they raped her and the other went to the location moments later and filmed it.
On Thursday, Ibrahim Alshafe, 25, an Egyptian national, and Abdulla Ahmadi, 26, an Iranian national, were found guilty of two counts of rape.
Karin Al-Danasurt, 20, an Egyptian national, was also found guilty of all four counts of rape as a secondary party by encouraging and filming the ordeal. All three men are seeking asylum.
Jurors returned their verdicts after more than 16 hours of deliberation, after a five-week trial. The defendants showed no reaction as the verdicts were delivered.
Judge Christine Henson thanked jurors for their service. “It has been a difficult case not only in the subject matter but also with various disruptions,” she said.
The border security and asylum minister, Alex Norris, said the Home Office would seek to deport the three men once they had been sentenced.
Footage shown to jurors showed Alshafe smiling and sticking his tongue out during the attack, as well as slapping the woman in the face.
He and Ahmadi claimed during the trial that the encounter had been consensual and that the victim had approached them along the seafront, kissed and touched them, and said something about sex.
Al-Danasurt, who claimed he had tried to stop the attack by filming it, also denied he spat in the woman’s mouth and called her a “dirty bitch”.
The prosecutor Hanna Llewellyn-Waters KC told jurors: “Frankly, to these defendants, the complainant was meat. They wanted sex and that could be achieved by being with someone who was in no state to resist them.”
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.”
Speaking from behind a screen, she could be heard crying and said: “It’s the filmer’s face I see every time I close my eyes, laughing at me.”
At the time of the incident, all three defendants 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 and arrived in the UK in June 2025, while Alshafe and Al-Danasurt, who arrived in the UK in September 2024, were roommates at the hotel.
After the verdicts, Llewellyn-Waters told the judge all three defendants were in the process of appealing against their refused asylum applications.
Earlier on the night of the attack, the three men went to a bar and nightclub where Alshafe spoke to a woman via Google Translate about his hopes to marry and get citizenship in the UK.
The prosecution suggested Alshafe had been knocked back by several women and with the co-defendants was “on the prowl”.
Llewellyn-Waters said to him in court: “You were nothing more than a nasty little predator.”
After the attack the men returned to their hotel by bus and later had a barbecue, around the same time the woman was waiting to be medically examined.
Ahmadi left the hotel the day after the rape and moved to an address in Crewe, Cheshire, where he was arrested on 12 October, 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 13 October, Alshafe and Al-Danasurt were arrested by police at their hotel.
All three men are due to be sentenced on 15 July.
