Two 17-year-old Afghan asylum seekers, who arrived in Britain unaccompanied in 2024, were on Monday sentenced to long detention terms for raping a 15-year-old girl in Leamington Spa, Warwick Crown Court heard.
The convicts, identified as Jan Jahanzeb and Israr Niazal attacked the girl, who was drunk and separated from her friends, in a park in May 2025, prosecutors said.
During the assault, the visibly distressed victim managed to record footage on her phone in which she was heard sobbing and screaming: “Please help me… let me go… I want to go home.
“The day I was raped changed me as a person,” the girl said in her victim impact statement, adding that the incident was her first sexual experience.
Judge Sylvia de Bertodano lifted normal reporting restrictions to name the teenagers, who had pleaded guilty in October, saying it was in the public interest.
Jahanzeb, who will turn 18 early next year, received 10 years and eight months in detention while Niazal was handed nine years and 10 months.
The judge described their actions as a betrayal of genuine asylum seekers fleeing harm, and recommended both be deported at the end of their sentences.
Jahanzeb’s lawyer, Robert Holt, said his client crossed the Channel in a small boat in January after three failed attempts. And Niazal’s lawyer, Joshua Radcliffe, said his client fled to Britain last November after the Taliban murdered his father, a former Afghan army soldier.
According to Reuters, sexual offences committed by asylum seekers have become a major political flashpoint in Britain as the government struggles to stop thousands of migrants arriving in small boats across the English Channel.
Recent similar cases include an Afghan national who pleaded guilty to raping a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton and an Ethiopian man jailed in September for sexually assaulting a teenage girl and another woman in Epping, north of London.
Both incidents triggered large-scale and sometimes violent protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers.
- Reuters