Woman feared for her life in alleged Brighton beach assault, court hears
A trial is continuing at Hove Crown Court today into her alleged rape in October
Last updated 18th Mar 2026
A woman who was allegedly raped by two asylum seekers on Brighton beach said she thought she was going to be killed in the attack, a court has heard.
Egyptian nationals Karin Al-Danasurt, 20, and Ibrahim Alshafe, 25, and Iranian national Abdulla Ahmadi, 26, allegedly targeted the woman, who cannot be identified, in a “cynical, predatory and callous” attack after she became separated from her friends while on a girls’ night out.
Prosecutors allege Alshafe and Ahmadi repeatedly raped the woman on Brighton beach in the early hours of October 4 2025, while Al-Danasurt filmed the incident, a trial at Hove Crown Court has heard.
In a video interview recording played to jurors on Wednesday, the complainant was asked what she could recall from the night of the alleged attack.
She said she had been at a bar with friends until around 3am before going to a nightclub near the beach, the court heard.
“I remember taking drinks off this Asian man but then I remember being on my hands and knees in the toilet being sick…” the alleged victim said. “After that I don’t remember anything.”
Prosecutors say the three defendants approached the complainant when she was “staggering in the street” alone.
“The first time I realised I was on the beach I could hear seagulls and I could hear men talking but foreign accents, not English,” jurors heard the alleged victim recall in the interview.
She said: “So at first it was like I was coming round and someone had their finger in my mouth and like was rubbing their finger in my mouth and it was almost like I kept falling back asleep.
“Like every time I, I was there but I wasn’t, like it was such a weird experience… I’ve been drunk many times, I’ve never had this like feeling before. And like as I could remember, like I could see a light in my face, like do you know like when you put a flash on a, like, on the camera on an iPhone and I could hear a foreign accent saying ‘dirty bitch, dirty bitch’ and I was like ‘what?’, but I still wasn’t there at this point.”
The alleged victim began to cry in the recording when asked what her reaction was, and said she heard men laughing as she was assaulted.
She said “I heard like five voices, that’s what scared me, there was quite a few voices, like there was a whole group”, jurors heard.
In the recording, she later 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 alleged victim said she remembered being bought drinks by a man she described as Asian and in his mid-30s or early-40s in the nightclub, the court heard.
At the time of the alleged offences, all three defendants knew each other and were residents at the Cisswood House Hotel in Lower Beeding, near Horsham, West Sussex, which was Home Office-approved accommodation for asylum seekers, jurors have heard.
Ahmadi, of Crewe in Cheshire, and Alshafe, of Lower Beeding, have each denied two counts of raping the woman.
Al-Danasurt, also of Lower Beeding, is jointly charged on all four rape counts 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 charge relates to an allegation that Al-Danasurt sent recordings of the alleged rapes to Ahmadi’s phone shortly after the incident.
The trial continues.