Two 17-year-old Afghan asylum seekers who arrived in Britain unaccompanied in 2024 were sentenced to long detention terms on Monday 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 attack, the visibly distressed victim managed to record images on her phone in which she can be 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 restrictions on reporting the names of the teens, 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 received nine years and 10 months.
The judge described their actions as a betrayal of genuine asylum seekers fleeing danger and recommended that they both be deported at the end of their sentences.
Jahanzeb’s lawyer, Robert Holt, said his client crossed the English 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 killed his father, a former Afghan army soldier.
According to Reuters, sexual crimes committed by asylum seekers have become a major point of political tension in Britain as the government struggles to detain thousands of migrants arriving in small boats across the English Channel.
Recent similar cases include that of an Afghan national who begged guilty of raping a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton and an Ethiopian man jailed in September for sexually assaulting a teenager and another woman in Epping, north London.
Both incidents sparked large-scale and sometimes violent protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers.
(Reuters)
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