Bournemouth, the university town I spent my studying days and where millions have visited over centuries for a coastal break, has been hit by a slew of murders, rapes and sex attacks, some of which have been linked to local asylum hotels. The tranquil town – which still gets eight million tourist visits per year – has been upturned by taxpayer-funded asylum seekers given the residency of the 79-room Chine Hotel, the 102-room Roundhouse Hotel and the 123-room Britannia Hotel.
Young women in Britain are advised by our Foreign Office not to visit such countries alone, but now young, unchecked men from these countries wander the streets
The Conservatives, who once held their Tory party conference in Bournemouth, handed over the hotels to asylum seekers. They put arrivals from countries with appalling attitudes towards women – such as Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq (which recently lowered the marital age to nine years-old) – next to blue flag beaches and student bars and clubs. Young women in Britain are advised by our Foreign Office not to visit such countries alone, but now young, unchecked men from these countries wander the streets. It has been some parting gift from the last government.
Dorset Police confirm that between 1 January 2025 and 31 March 2026 there were eight sexual offence reports where an offender was specifically from the town’s asylum accommodation hotels.
When I studied journalism at the glorious Bournemouth University from 2003-2006, I often reported for the student press on ‘crime sprees’ no more serious than bus shelter graffiti or a night time streaker, later revealed to be a pranking student. Now, journalists there have to report on far more serious matters.
Recently, a Syrian who arrived in the UK in 2023 and was given permanent leave to remain under a family reunion scheme, was convicted of raping a teenage girl in a portable toilet after he offered to give her a ride home on his e-bike. Syrian Mohammed Abdullah, 19, of West Drayton, London, raped and assaulted the woman after bodily carrying her into the cubicle on July 6 last year.
The court witnesses called out: ‘What are you doing with her?’ The victim recalled: ‘I remember being dragged into the portable loo at this point, the door being shut and locked.’
Chret Callender, 28, from Trinidad – a failed asylum seeker living in the Britannia Hotel – was convicted of rape after forcing himself on a young woman after turning up drunk at her home in the early hours of 14 June, 2025 after following her home at night through Bournemouth’s town centre gardens.
The victim broke down as she delivered her statement to the court: ‘What he did that night destroyed my sense of safety. I now suffer panic attacks, anxiety, and fear. I no longer feel safe in a place I call home.’
We may ask, what war-torn part of popular UK holiday destinations like Trinidad are these men fleeing from? And why do they remain even after their applications have failed?
I previously worked in front line asylum provision and also reported from migrant camps around the world, writing here before about how and why these men arrive and how they remain.
In October 2025, asylum seekers at The Roundhouse hotel were jailed for attacks on a policeman and a doctor. Afghan Akmal Sifa, 23, ripped off a metal window blind and used it to assault a GP when receiving treatment in September. Sudanese national Khalid Mohammed, 22, kicked a police officer in the chest when he was arrested over a drunken disturbance in March.
Police are still looking for Britannia Hotel migrant Abdoela Berhan, 35, from Eritrea, found guilty this month of punching a woman unconscious outside Cameo nightclub in 2024 breaking her nose, after she rejected his advances. He was previously convicted of spitting at and kicking a Subway shop staff member when he tried to make him leave for being aggressive. Berhan was caught a few hours later when he returned to the sandwich shop as a Just Eat driver.
I spent many nights drunk inside and outside the same nightclub – known as Elements when I was there – and apart from the occasional scrap amongst boys, women were broadly safe. In Bournemouth, students were able to move around the town freely in youthfully exuberant fancy dress, walking home alone through the pretty and well-kept Pleasure Gardens or the Bournemouth Zig Zag walkway, now both scenes of recent sex attacks.
Already hit by a cost of living crisis and rising fuel and rates costs, many of the shops on the once pretty The Avenue and Bournemouth Triangle area of Bournemouth are now shuttered. Tourists are being scared away, but their replacement guests – hotels full of asylum seekers – are unlikely to buy huge amounts of stock from local boutique shops and tea rooms.
Labour MP Tom Hayes has begged for the closure of the hotels. ‘People haven’t been coming to Bournemouth because they’ve been affected by the cost-of-living crisis, a global pandemic and austerity. There’s been a real decline in our coastal towns and I want zero asylum hotels in the country. Their closure is really important for the recovery of the tourist economy.’
In January 2023, an Afghan asylum seeker, Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai, 21, was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of 29 years for fatally stabbing 21-year-old Thomas Roberts, an aspiring Royal Marine, in March 2022 in Bournemouth. Roberts had stepped in as a peacemaker in a dispute over an e-scooter.
It was later revealed that Abdulrahimzai had previously been convicted of murdering two men with an automatic rifle in Serbia in 2018 but managed to enter the UK in 2019 by falsely claiming to be an unaccompanied child. He had been pretending to be a 14-year-old boy at local Winton Academy secondary school. The Telegraph reported, at lunchtimes he would ask out other 14-year-old girls and scrap with with other year ten boys.
The fact that once quiet Bournemouth is ill-equipped to deal with such crime, also encouraged monster Nasen Saadi, 21 – a criminology student from Croydon, who moved from Thailand to Britain with his parents aged four – to target Bournemouth for a random stabbing attack on two women on Durley Chine Beach in May 2024. Knife-obsessed maniac Saadi, who had a ‘grievance against women,’ had searched ‘What hotels don’t have CCTV in UK.’
Just days before the murder, he had looked up ‘Bournemouth CCTV’ and ‘Bournemouth pier CCTV’. Before stabbing to death complete stranger Amie Gray 34, and seriously injuring her friend, 38.
The government does not centrally collect national data on arrests, prosecutions or convictions by immigration status. Using freedom of information requests, the Centre for Migration Control (CMC) managed to extract data from the Ministry of Justice which found there had been 104,000 convictions of non-UK nationals, not just asylum seekers, between 2021 and 2023.
Neil O’Brien, MP for Harborough, who published some of this data on his Substack on says, ‘What little hard data we do have on migration and crime suggests that, far from being homogenous, there are massive differences in crime rates between different migrant groups. These differences should be properly understood and feeding in to policy. Instead they are just being ignored.’
Bournemouth is learning that lesson first hand.
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