An asylum seeker accused of filming a woman being raped by two others on Brighton beach has said he recorded the alleged attack as he was “trying to stop them”, and told them they were going to “kill her”.
Egyptian nationals Karin Al-Danasurt, 20, and Ibrahim Alshafe, 25, and Iranian national Abdulla Ahmadi, 26, allegedly targeted the woman in a “cynical, predatory and callous” attack.
Alshafe and Ahmadi are accused of repeatedly raping the woman on the beach of the East Sussex city in the early hours of October 4 2025, while Al-Danasurt filmed the incident, a trial at Hove Crown Court has heard.
Jurors were 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.
Giving evidence on Tuesday, Al-Danasurt said of his three recordings that he was trying to get Alshafe and Ahmadi to stop and also to “defend himself” so he could tell someone what happened.
Before he filmed the incident he said he tried to “grab them away” but nobody responded to him, the court heard.
Speaking through an Arabic interpreter, he said: “I told them: ‘What are you doing? Guys this is haram, forbidden, this is fornication, stop what you’re doing.’
“The situation itself, I see that it was a horrible situation. This is the first time in my life I see something like that.
“From what I see in front of me from the situation itself, even the girl, she wasn’t able to breathe normally or to take a breath.”
Asked about some of what he said in the video, where he is speaking in Arabic, he told the jurors he said to the pair: “‘God will expose you’, expose here means curse you, what you’re doing will be shown.”
He also said in the video: “God will expose you. You’re going to kill her boys.”
Al-Danasurt added: “I tried to urge them to stop, they didn’t respond. I tried to speak to them… With no avail I stop them.”
At the time of the alleged offences, all three defendants knew each other and were residents at the Cisswood House Hotel in Lower Beeding, near Horsham, West Sussex, which was Home Office-approved accommodation for asylum seekers, jurors have heard.
Earlier on Tuesday, Al-Danasurt told jurors he got the bus to Brighton from his hotel because he “felt bored” and “just wanted to kill time”.
The three men went to Brighton together after meeting at the bus stop and went walking around to several shops.
Al-Danasurt said there was no plan for the night and he wanted to go for a few hours and come back, but stayed out all night because there were no buses back until the morning.
He did not spend all night with Ahmadi and Alshafe but re-met them along the seafront.
CCTV footage shows the pair walking with the complainant onto the beach.
Al-Danasurt said he saw them from a distance and followed them because “we came to Brighton together, I wanted to know what’s going on”.
As he followed them down the beach he said: “I couldn’t judge what’s happening 100% but it might be several things.”
Ahmadi, of Crewe in Cheshire, and Alshafe, of Lower Beeding, have each denied two counts of raping the woman.
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.
On Tuesday, he said: “I swear by God I did not share those videos with anyone.
“I didn’t know the video was already sent, I knew that the video was sent from my phone when I came to the court here from my barrister.
“I said that in my police interview I had deleted the videos myself, why, I haven’t got any idea somebody sent those videos to someone else.”
He added that he thought the video was deleted once it was sent by someone else.
The trial continues.