Brighton beach, swelled by sun-seekers on hot summer days, becomes one big after party after dark. Revellers from the seafront nightclubs will spill out on to the shingle to smoke, or share another drink, before staggering home, arm in arm. When it’s warm enough, they might go for an ill-advised dip in the briny. But on a cold autumn night last year, the hum of drunken chatter gave way to the screams of a poor, unsuspecting victim, and the depraved cackling of her tormentors.
We do not have borders because all migrants are murderers, or jihadists, or gang-rapists. We have them because some of them will be
Yesterday, three men were found guilty of ‘repeatedly raping’ a woman on the beach in the early hours of 4 October. Iranian Abdulla Ahmadi, 26, Egyptian Ibrahim Alshafe, 25, and Karin Al-Danasurt, 20, also from Egypt, were ‘on the lookout for women’ to use ‘for sexual purposes’. They went to bars and clubs. They came across a woman in her thirties at a fast-food joint. She had been separated from her friends. She was ‘highly intoxicated’, vomiting on her hands and knees. She couldn’t stand or walk unaided. They took her to the beach and raped her. They laughed. They filmed it. ‘Frankly, to these defendants, the complainant was meat’, prosecutor Hanna Llewellyn-Waters KC told jurors. ‘They wanted sex and that could be achieved by being with someone who was in no state to resist them.’
The victim sobbed as she gave evidence behind a screen: ‘It’s the filmer’s face I see every time I close my eyes, laughing at me.’ That was Karin Al-Danasurt, who tried to claim he was only recording to help the woman, to provide evidence of her ordeal. The court also heard he spat in her mouth, and called her a ‘dirty bitch’. His demonic grin is now burned into the nation’s psyche, too: a photograph of him leaving Hove Crown Court is splashed across today’s newspapers. A sweatshirt is draped over his eyes. He is smiling from ear to ear.
The three men were ‘asylum seekers’, a euphemism we should probably no longer indulge. They were staying in a Home Office-approved hotel in nearby Horsham. Ahmadi and Alshafe actually met on a dinghy, as they entered Britain illegally in June 2025. Al-Danasurt had arrived a year earlier. The prosecution claimed he had been convicted of murder in Egypt. After the verdicts were handed down, the judge heard that the three men were in the process of appealing against their refused asylum applications. It is ‘not a foregone conclusion’ that the defendants will be deported following their convictions. Welcome to Britain, where we import rapists and struggle to get rid of them.
Yes, we have plenty of woman-abusing scum of our own. But that’s all the more reason not to throw open our doors to anyone with the cash to pay a people smuggler and the will to weather the Channel. Britain is routinely offering refuge not only to those fleeing war and persecution, but also those fleeing charges in other countries; not only to those looking for a better life, but also warped men who have been floating around Europe looking for the softest touch. Horror story after horror story, from the Clapham acid attacker to the Hartlepool terrorist to the Afghan teens who raped a girl in Leamington Spa last year, have made this grimly clear.
We do not have women’s toilets because all men are rapists and sex pests, just as we do not have borders because all migrants are murderers, or jihadists, or gang-rapists. We have them because some of them will be. Arguably more so if no documentation is needed and a bed in taxpayer-funded accommodation is offered. Arguably more so if they hail from nations in which sexual violence is rife. Nations like Egypt, in which the sexual harassment and assault of women by mobs of men at protests, and even Eid celebrations, periodically scandalises the international press. Nations like Afghanistan, in which a rape can result in the victim being punished, even killed, and which sits at the bottom of the table on every measure of women’s wellbeing.
A free, secure society is a fragile thing. It requires a state willing to enforce laws, patrol borders, draw lines. A beach. A park. These are places in which women should not expect to encounter evil, even if they have had one too many. But safety long ago took a backseat to phoney virtue and the diktats of international treaties. The Brighton beach gang rape is what happens when the walls of the walled garden come tumbling down.
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