A small boat migrant accused of raping a woman on Brighton beach has claimed police threatened him with prison and doctored his witness statement.

Iranian Kurd Abdulla Ahmadi told Lewes Crown Court that police came to his cell at 3am and told him he would spend seven years in jail if he did not sign a piece of paper.

Ahmadi is on trial alongside Egyptian nationals Karin Al-Danasurt, 20, and Ibrahim Alshafe, 25.

The prosecution alleges Alshafe and Ahmadi repeatedly raped the woman on the beach in the early hours of October 4, 2025, while Al-Danasurt filmed the incident.

At the time of the alleged offences, all three defendants knew each other and were residents at the Cisswood House Hotel in Horsham, which was Home Office-approved accommodation for asylum seekers, jurors were told.

Ahmadi told the court his statement had been added to by police.

“I was kept in the police station for three days,” he said.

“One night at 3am, they came to me and said if you do not sign this piece of paper you will be in prison for seven years.

“They did not give me any explanation.”

When he was asked why his legal team had never mentioned the incident, he said: “I am not making it up.

“It happened.”

In a bad-tempered exchange, prosecutor Hanna Llewellyn-Waters asked him: “Why are you smiling?

“You are entirely opportunistic, aren’t you?

“Lies trip out of your mouth, don’t they?”

Ahmadi, 26, denies dragging the 33-year-old woman onto the beach and raping her in October last year.

He told the jury the woman approached him and his friend after they left a seafront nightclub and asked them for sex.

He said the woman led them to the beach where they had sex behind a beach hut after putting her hand inside his trousers.

Judge Christine Henson KC asked him: “Did you feel comfortable with this woman touching your penis with your friend standing there?”

“It was very normal, it was very common,” Ahmadi said.

“She came to us, we did not go to her.”

He described his co-defendant Karin Al-Danasurt as “arrogant” and said nobody in the asylum hotel where they lived liked him.

All three men said they spoke only very limited English.

Ms Llwellyn-Waters said four minutes and 27 seconds after leaving a seafront Burger King, the woman was on her way to the beach.

The jury heard Alshafe said there was very little conversation between them before the woman said: “Come to sex.”

Asked if he heard his friend discussing anything else with the woman, Ahmadi said: “Nothing, probably some small or basic words.”

Ahmadi also had an interaction with a friend of the complainant earlier in the night.

He denied trying to grab the woman as they left another late-night bar.

Ms Llwellyn-Waters said he was arrogant and entitled when he tried to slip his hand around her waist.

“She was thinking that I’m touching her, but I didn’t touch her at all,” he said.

CCTV from the doorway of the Revolution bar showed Ahmadi interacting with the woman, who cannot be identified for legal reasons.

“Your apology is non-existent,” Ms Llwellyn-Waters said.

“You turn and walk away because you are arrogant and entitled.

“You stretch your hand out to her, she pushes you away and you are annoyed.

“The idea that was an accident is a lie.”

“No, it’s not a lie,” he said.

Ahmadi and Alshafe have each denied two counts of raping the woman.

Al-Danasurt is jointly charged on all four counts of rape as a secondary party “encouraging the rape by his actions at the scene, including filming it”, and has pleaded not guilty to all four.

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 shortly after the incident.

The trial continues.