An asylum-seeker charged with raping a woman on Brighton beach was a “nasty little predator”, a jury was told today (Thursday 9 April).
Ibrahim Alshafe, 25, had approached a number of women in a couple of night clubs but had been rebuffed, the jury was told.
Hanna Llewellyn-Waters, prosecuting, said: “You had been knocked back by several women that night.
“You were on the prowl with your two co-defendants at the end of the night, having been knocked back. The three of you settled on a woman who was entirely vulnerable.”
Alshafe said: “No she came. She approached us and she asked us to have sex with her.”
Miss Llewellyn-Waters said: “The suggestion by you that she wasn’t very drunk is, may I suggest, ridiculous.”
Alshafe said: “She wasn’t drunk. I don’t she was drunk. I thought that she had had a drink but she wasn’t drunk.”
Miss Llewellyn-Waters said: “You took her into the darkness and did what you wanted to her.”
Alshafe said: “No. We went down to the beach to have sex. She was in agreement and we were in agreement.”
Miss Llewellyn-Waters said: “You used and abused her for your sexual gratification. You thought her vulnerability was funny. You left her in pieces … You slapped her face and enjoyed her being treated as dirt.”
Alshafe said: “No. That didn’t happen. I was playful with her. It was foreplay. I was enjoying it and she was enjoying it.”
Miss Llewellyn-Waters said: “She was trash (to you) and that night you were nothing more than a nasty little predator.”
Alshafe said: “No. I was out for the evening. It was my first time in clubs and I got to the burger place to eat.
“And the day ended when she came to us and said she wanted to have sex and we went to the beach and that’s what happened.
“Maybe there were disputes and the impression she got when someone else (Karin Al-Danasurt) turned up.”
Miss Llewellyn-Waters said: “Nasty little predator.”
Earlier, she said: “This was a wintry night … cold and raining. It was a wet evening.”
She said that the complainant, a woman in her thirties whose identity is protected by law, had had become separated from her friends and was trying to find them.
But just yards along the A259 King’s Road from the seafront branch of Burger King, Alshafe said that the woman had approached him and moments later tried to put her hand down his trousers.
Alshafe said: “She asked me my name. She kissed me. She also brushed my hair and she said: ‘Wow!’”
Miss Llewellyn-Waters said: “About you?”
Alshafe said: “Yes.”
Miss Llewellyn-Waters said: “And so desperate was she to get inside your trousers that she tried to put her hands down the front of them right in front of the people in Burger King.
“What do you think it was that you had said or done that had created this magnetism?”
Alshafe said: “I was kissing her just like she was kissing me. I was standing there. She kissed Abdulla (Ahmadi) and then she kissed me.”
Miss Llewellyn-Waters said: “She didn’t kiss or touch any man at Revolution or Horizon – or at Burger King and that was just before she met you.
“What do you think it was about you that made you so irresistible to (her)?”
Alshafe said: “Maybe she noticed we were strangers for this country.”
Miss Llewellyn-Waters said that there had been no interaction between the complainant and the men when their paths crossed at Revolution, in West Street, Brighton, earlier in the evening – or later when they were all in Horizon, in King’s Road Arches, Brighton.
Alshafe said: “She said, ‘you like sex?’ She said, ‘come to sex.’”
Miss Llewellyn-Waters said: “And so it was that she couldn’t contain herself and touched both of you on the penis in the way that you say.”
Alshafe said: “She was standing on her feet and she could control herself.”
But Miss Llewellyn-Waters said: “She couldn’t control herself because she went up to two strangers and started to touch you!”
Alshafe said: “This is what happened.”
Miss Llewellyn-Waters said: “Don’t you think it odd that, on all the CCTV, not once is she shown touching your genitals?”
Alshafe said: “There must be cameras that show the time when she approached us and when she touched us.”
Miss Llewellyn-Waters said: “Unfortunately not … She was so desperate that, within seconds of getting to the beach, she started having sex with you.
“Nowhere on the CCTV on the walk to the beach does she touch you or Mr Ahmadi intimately.
“You say that, in the parts where there isn’t footage, she was all over you. But, in the parts where there is footage, she isn’t.”
Alshafe said: “She came. She approached us. She touched us and said let’s go down to the beach.”
Miss Llewellyn-Waters said: “Look at the state of her … She was very drunk. Her legs were not working properly. She was staggering. By the time she crossed the road, she had to be held up.
“You know full well what state she was in … And that’s why you targeted her because, unlike the other women who had rebuffed you, she was powerless to do so.”
Two of the three defendants are charged with the physical rape and the third man with encouraging what happened by filming it.
Abdulla Amih Ahmadi, 26, an Iranian, of Wistaston Road, Crewe, and Ibrahim Alshafe, 25, also Egyptian, also of Sandygate Lane, Lower Beeding, are each alleged to have raped the woman twice.
Karin Al-Danasurt, 20, an Egyptian, of Sandygate Lane, Lower Beeding, filmed the attack and is alleged to have to have later shared the footage.
The offences were alleged to have taken place at about 5am on Saturday 4 October 2025.
Miss Llewellyn-Waters said today that, in unchallenged evidence, the woman had spoken to her friends seven minutes after leaving the three men on Brighton seafront.
She was described as “wailing and hysterical, saying she has been raped”.
Alshafe replied: “When we left her she was good.”
The trial continues.
