An asylum-seeker who smiled and stuck his tongue out to his friend while he was allegedly raping a woman on Brighton beach has denied “celebrating her humiliation”.
Ibrahim Alshafe, 25, is on trial alongside co-defendants Karin Al-Danasurt, 20, and Abdulla Ahmadi, 26, for allegedly targeting the woman in a “cynical, predatory and callous” attack in the early hours of Saturday 4 October last year.
Alshafe and Ahmadi are accused of repeatedly raping the woman behind the Brighton Beach Patrol hut, out of sight of security cameras, while Al-Danasurt filmed the incident.
Giving evidence at Hove Crown Court today (Wednesday 8 April), Alshafe said that he believed that the woman wanted to have sex with him, adding: “I swear I didn’t rape her.”
The Egyptian national previously told the trial the woman had approached himself and Ahmadi, kissing them and touching them so their understanding was she wanted to have sex.
In a video shown to jurors at Hove Crown Court, Alshafe is seen smiling with his tongue out and making a hand gesture towards his friend Al-Danasurt who was filming.
But he said he did not know he was being filmed, and instead was reacting to his friend making a hand gesture at him first.
Put to him in cross-examination by prosecutor Hanna Llewellyn-Waters KC that he was celebrating her humiliation, he replied: “This is not celebration, this a reaction to a gesture that was made to me.”
Speaking through an Arabic interpreter, he also told jurors: “I was happy, she was happy.”
Alshafe was also asked about a final third recording that has been shown in court of him slapping the woman in the face.
He said: “I wasn’t hitting her to punish her or torture her, I was playing with her.”
Jurors have been told the woman had been separated from her friends while on a girls’ night out, and prosecutors said the three defendants approached her when she was “staggering in the street” alone.
The court has heard that footage shows the woman falling down twice.
Asked if she was unconscious at any time, Alshafe answered no, and when asked if she was asleep at any time, he replied: “No, she was enjoying what we were doing.”
He said in the walk from the beach before and after the incident they were kissing each other.
At the time of the alleged offences, all three defendants knew each other and were residents at a Home Office-approved hotel accommodation for asylum-seekers near Horsham, jurors were told.
Giving evidence in court, Alshafe admitted he lied in his initial police interviews about not being in Brighton and said he was at his accommodation at the time of the incident.
On Wednesday, he said: “I was scared, I was terrified of what’s going on.”
Alshafe, of Lower Beeding, and Iranian national Ahmadi, of Crewe in Cheshire, have each denied two counts of raping the woman.
Egyptian national 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 via Snapchat shortly after the incident.
The trial continues.
