By Stanley Murphy-Johns, Anahita Hossein-Pour, Ellie Crabbe and Flora Thompson, Press Association
An asylum-seeker who filmed a woman being raped on Brighton beach was convicted of murder in Egypt, according to prosecutors.
Karin Al-Danasurt, 20, was found guilty of four counts of rape as a secondary party by encouraging and filming the brutal attack in October last year.
The Egyptian national was convicted after a trial at Hove Crown Court alongside Ibrahim Alshafe, 25, and Iranian Abdulla Ahmadi, 26, who were each found guilty of two counts of rape.
The trio all arrived in Britain after crossing the Channel by boat and have decisions pending on asylum claim appeals.
Details of Al-Danasurt’s past crimes emerged at a plea hearing in November last year but the judge withdrew the evidence from the case after his defence team contested the conviction.
At the time, prosecutors told the court that Al-Danasurt had been convicted of murder in his absence in Egypt, adding that the basis of his asylum claim was that he fled the country to “evade a lengthy custodial sentence”.
But his defence barrister said it was in fact his brother who had the conviction for murder, not him.
They added that the UK government’s assessment of Egypt is that a person who is openly critical of the government is likely to be at risk of serious harm.
As a result, the evidence was not heard by jurors during the trial because of the dispute.
Today (Thursday 23 April), Hanna Llewellyn-Waters, prosecuting, told the court that there were “ongoing inquiries at a very senior level” about Al-Danasurt’s crimes abroad.
She added that he had been given a caution in the UK for criminal damage in April last year but said that she was “not in a position” to provide any more detail.
She also told Judge Christine Henson that it was “not a foregone conclusion that these defendants will be deported”, adding “I am not the Home Office” when asked about reports to determine whether the rapists met the threshold for extended sentences.
But after the verdicts, the Border Security and Asylum Minister Alex Norris said: “Once sentencing has taken place, we will move to deport them off British soil.”
At the time of the attack, all three defendants knew each other and were living at the Cisswood House hotel, Home Office-approved hotel accommodation for asylum seekers in Lower Beeding, near Horsham.
The trial was told that Ahmadi and Alshafe met each other in France and crossed the English Channel on the same boatd, arriving in the UK on Thursday 19 June 2025.
Jurors were told that Al-Danasurt arrived in the country on Saturday 21 September 2024 but were not told how he came to be in the country.
The jury was also told that Alshafe’s asylum application had been refused on Friday 3 October but he told the court that he did not know about the update to his case before going to Brighton that night.
Giving evidence, he said that he was from the port city of Alexandria, in Egypt, where he lived with his parents and two sisters.
He left school without formal academic qualifications and worked as a carpenter and served as a military conscript for three years.
He said that he wanted to make a better future for himself. Asked if his plan was to come to the UK to do that, he said: “Yes.”
Al-Danasurt was born in Egypt and went to school there until around the age of 11 and left his home country to come to the UK in June 2022.
Ahmadi told jurors that he left Iran because he was working for a Kurdish opposition party and was discovered by security police who went to look for him at his home and asked his mother where he was.
Speaking through a Kurdish Sorani interpreter, he said: “If I hadn’t left, I would have been arrested and been killed.”
Ahmadi had not been to school and had received education only since he had been in prison, the court was told.
His father died when he was 13 and he worked as a labourer and farmer in Iran.
Britain has prison transfer agreements with more than 110 countries. These permit foreign prisoners to serve their sentences in their home countries but Iran is not one of those countries.
There is an agreement with Egypt but it is voluntary. A prisoner must agree to the move before being transferred, as must both states.
An early removal scheme (ERS) allows eligible foreign prisoners, who are serving determinate sentences, to be deported from the UK before having served their full sentence.
Under current law, most foreign nationals in jail can be considered for removal after serving 30 per cent of their custodial sentence.
Once they are removed under the early removal scheme, they are not imprisoned in their home country but are banned from returning to the UK. If they returned, they would have to serve the rest of their sentence from before they were deported.
Border Security and Asylum Minister Alex Norris said: “My thoughts are first and foremost with the victim of this appalling crime, and with all those who have been affected by it.
“What she endured is deeply disturbing, and I commend her bravery in coming forward and reporting these vile individuals. I share the public’s outrage in their horrendous actions.
“The perpetrators have now been rightly convicted, and justice has been delivered by the courts. Once sentencing has taken place, we will move to deport them off British soil.”
The Egyptian authorities have been contacted for comment.
Well, I’m very grateful to the RN LI for meeting this man in the middle of the ocean and making sure he got to England safely.
…. So you’d be happy if he and ALL THE OTHERS on his boat DIE by DROWNING……… Pathetic attitude…
Quite a leap you’ve made there from the point of complaining about public funded, captured woke charities running a de facto trafficking taxi service to wishing lots of people dead. As an aside, in the case of these 3, the world would indeed be a better place without these absolute human scum in it.
RNLI is a woke charity now? Right…
You know damn well that boat crossings are typically filled to the brim with 20+ people, so Rostrum is completely justified and accurate in his criticism.
How many of these men.. it’s always men…are you taking in at your place Benjy? Let me guess… someone else’s problem/cost/issue. Usually working class people. Smug quislings like you never have to enjoy the consequences of their pathetic opinions. Lets hope none of your female relatives have to suffer the consequnlences of this suicidal empathy. You really are as dumb as a rock.
So your happy that women and children both girls and boys are treated like this day in and day out now in this country? Are city and country are not safe.
But that’s okay. The human rights are more important for the thousands of undocumented people entering this country with no idea what their background is. There human rights matter more than the human rights of the victims then?
We have enough wrong’uns born and living here, already doing these sorts of crimes. Why are justifying bringing more in?
How do you actually sleep at night. And if you’ve got any children. I hope they are being safeguarded. As they deserve to feel safe and not living in fear that they might be attacked, beaten and spat on for simply trying to live their life because in some cultures. Women are s**m. Not the British culture though…
This case just gets worse, detain and deport all illegal arrivals. No more asylum seekers for quite a while until we deal with the mess our elected governments have made. Surely British people need to come first now!
Not something we could do legally speaking, but in that spirit, the improvement would be to speed up processing, so those refused can be removed from the country, quicker. For me, that’s the main challenge, when you see the processing time trending upwards throughout the Conservative years.
But surely as qualified engineers, doctors or lawyers we should be welcoming them into our society?
Thank you Green Party Council and Labour Party Council for making Brighton & Hove a ‘City of Sanctuary’.
Very quiet today Bella Sankey? Not promoting city of Sanctuary today?
The Greens and Labour are fine with this news a girl was raped by 3 illegal immigrants welcomed in to this city.
If you vote Labour or Green you are an idiot.
Compelling argument, Josephine. Very astute. 😑
Maybe Greens and Labour do not feel the need to play politics over someone’s trauma?
That’s what being an adjusted human being is, Josephine.
Hard to argue with the final point. Objectively, demonstratively, measurably true. People like Benjamin are part of the problem. The notion that those 2 parties don’t play politics with tragic and unavoidable hate crimes is absurd. These mentally ill ideologues do nothing but espose identity politics on any topic. Nothing they think comes from a place of mature critical thinking
Yet, you’ve haven’t managed to say anything other than throw insults around. Is that mature critical thinking? Just comes across as someone who endorses hate speech and thoughts through their own limited capacity. Only hard to argue against if that’s true.
I notice your hate speech has disappeared from some previous articles.
For balance, there are definitely some arguments to be made about tighter regulations around migration, and stories like this certainly prompt questions about whether this individual has been allowed in under any circumstances – one I suspect all of us are going to agree to. That’s the mature thinking.
Unfortunately, inflammatory narratives like that just undermine any point one is trying to make. Childish insults are just that. Childish.
Benjamin 3 hours ago
Yeah, your AI generations are hallucinating worse by the day, which incidentally is a known issue with LLMs, so I’m just going to ignore it, to be honest.
Honestly…. 😂
All the left seem very quiet on this story! Maybe they have finally realised their suicidal empathy has severe consequences!
Benjamin ….
You’re still doing the exact same thing—dodging the actual point and hiding behind tone-policing.
No one here is saying “politicise trauma for fun.” They’re reacting to a genuinely horrific case and what it says about safety, accountability, and how these situations are handled. And instead of engaging with that, you jump straight to sarcasm and act like you’ve taken the moral high ground.
You haven’t.
All you’ve done is avoid the substance of the discussion while talking down to people who are clearly upset about something serious. Calling yourself “an adjusted human being” doesn’t make your argument stronger—it just makes you sound condescending while contributing nothing.
If you actually want to add something, try acknowledging the reality of what people are reacting to instead of dismissing it because you don’t like how it’s being said.
Right now, you’re not de-escalating anything—you’re just trivialising it and pretending that counts as insight.
Yeah, your AI generations are hallucinating worse by the day, which incidentally is a known issue with LLMs, so I’m just going to ignore it, to be honest.
you sound like someone who skimmed a headline and decided that counts as understanding.
Benjy never engages on any particular point, he points, fires and trolls generic drivel and he’s off then to the next point. He gets into so many arguments with so many people here that one can only reasonably determine its deliberate and he enjoys it… or he has the instincts of a dung beetle and cannot stop rolling around in his own excrement…
Apart from all the points that I do and have engaged in over several years, but don’t let reality get in the way.
No, what I don’t tend to engage with is ad hominems, because that’s just the tool of someone who has lost an argument and has nothing further of value to say. Challenging people with a different point of view is enjoyable because every once in a while, they will offer a perspective that I hadn’t considered. You, on the other hand, only seem to offer insults to everyone around you, which is clearly hate speech.
Prove me wrong, and I’ll reciprocate in kind.
He doesn’t seem to have any respect from other people. But takes much pleasure in upsetting people. Even conversations that have no relevance to him .
Why does he portray himself as a council member but they seem to be unaware of who he is .
Very strange
Agreed. For sure he is an oddball.
What about the victim what that poor woman had to go through they were in Brighton that night as predators
Indeed. That’s not something one easily moves on from. I hope she’s getting all the support she needs, both professionally and from her family and friends. Maybe a little bit of comfort knowing that the scumbags in question are facing the legal consequences for their actions.
This isn’t empathy, it’s a tired script you keep recycling. Every time someone says something remotely heavy, you jump in with the same half-baked concer and vague mental health advice like you’re ticking a box. It’s not helpful—it’s performative and, frankly, pretty grating at this point.
If you actually cared, you’d engage with what’s being said instead of defaulting to generic, pseudo-therapist lines. And if you’re not qualified (which is obvious), stop positioning yourself like you are. Repeating this over and over doesn’t make you supportive—it just makes you predictable and hard to take seriously.
Well said
You too Rupert, I hope you looked that that support available for your own trauma.
Even by your own inimitable standards that is an impressive level of gibberish.
Won’t mean anything to you, Jay.
Strange how his grammer is when clearly not using gpt 🤣