Three men who raped woman on Brighton beach while she heard laughter are guilty

Ibrahim Alshafe, 25, Abdulla Ahmadi, 26, and Karin Al-Danasurt, 20, have been convicted of raping the woman after she became separated from her friends on a night out

Three men have been found guilty of repeatedly raping a woman on Brighton beach in a “cynical, predatory and callous” attack.

Asylum seekers Ibrahim Alshafe, 25, Abdulla Ahmadi, 26, and Karin Al-Danasurt, 20, have been convicted at Hove Crown Court of raping a woman on Brighton beach after she became separated from her friends on a night out.

The 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. The victim told police afterwards that she could hear laughter while she was being attacked.

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 Alshafe, 25, and Iranian national Ahmadi, 26, were both found guilty of two counts of rape by jurors on Thursday. Egyptian national 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 and sticking his tongue out during the attack, as well as slapping the woman in the face.

He and Ahmadi had claimed during the trial 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 he spat in the woman’s mouth and called her a “dirty b*tch”. Prosecutor Hanna Llewellyn-Waters KC had told jurors: “Frankly, to these defendants, the complainant was meat.

“She was repeatedly abused for their sexual gratification and entertainment. They wanted sex and that could be achieved by being with someone who was in no state to resist them.”

She said the woman told police she 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 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 trio got ready at the hotel before getting the bus into 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.

She said she would like to be friends with him but did not believe he just wanted that “because you’re touching my breasts”. To which he replied: “I am forced by your beauty”.

The prosecution suggested that what really happened on the night of October 4 was 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 Thursday after it was established the offence can only be tried in a magistrates’ court.