Prosecutors allege Alshafe and Ahmadi repeatedly raped the woman on the beach of the East Sussex city in the early hours of October 4 2025
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A woman who was allegedly raped on Brighton beach by two asylum seekers while another filmed the attack told her friend she was “too scared to go outside” afterwards, a court has heard.
The woman, who cannot be identified, had been on a girls’ night out but became separated from her friends.
Egyptian nationals Karin Al-Danasurt, 20, and Ibrahim Alshafe, 25, and Iranian national Abdulla Ahmadi, 26, allegedly targeted the woman – who prosecutors said was “staggering in the street” alone – in a “cynical, predatory and callous” attack.
Prosecutors allege Alshafe and Ahmadi repeatedly raped the woman on the beach of the East Sussex city in the early hours of October 4 2025, while Al-Danasurt filmed the incident, a trial at Hove Crown Court has heard.
In a statement read to jurors by prosecutor Hanna Llewellyn-Waters, one of the complainant’s friends who picked her up after the alleged attack said the woman had “mud and dirt going down her legs and on her knees”.
She said her friend had a cut on her knee which “looked sore”.
Jurors heard the alleged victim’s friend had invited the woman to meet her the next day on October 5, but, “she (the alleged victim) told me she was too scared to go outside”.
The complainant’s sister gave evidence on Thursday, telling the court she rang her on October 4 after the alleged victim had tried to video-call their mother.
Asked how she responded to her sister saying she had been raped, the woman said: “I was like: ‘What do you mean?’ I was shocked.”
The alleged victim previously told jurors she was spat on, grabbed and held down during the attack.
The woman’s sister told the court that when she saw her on October 4, she noticed marks on the front of her neck.
“Finger marks,” she told the court. “Like someone had grabbed her throat.”
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 charges.
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.