“I am the victim,” Khaliz Ali Alshimery, a 46-year-old illegal migrant from Kuwait, told a courtroom in Oxford on 16 May 2024.
He was on trial for raping Sophie (not her real name), a 20-year-old autistic student, in Oxford a few months earlier. She had been walking home from a night out when Alshimery took her into a churchyard and raped her.
For the first time, this Substack can reveal the full story of Alshimery’s vile actions that night and how Sophie was let down by the authorities both before and after her rape.
Drawing on previously unpublished court transcripts and exclusive interviews with Sophie and her father, I reveal how Sophie’s rape has led her to make plans to flee Britain, how her pleas for answers from the Home Office went unanswered, and why she found the BBC’s failure to report her attacker’s immigration status “insulting”.
The court transcripts were obtained and paid for by the Centre for Justice Policy, which shared them with me.
After raping Sophie in the early hours of 19 November 2023, Alshimery was arrested at 11.20am that morning. He told his police interrogators that she had forced him to touch her sexually and demanded money for sex.
When his barrister, Peter Du Feu, repeatedly put these allegations to Sophie in court, her parents feared Alshimery would get away with his crime.
“That was the breaking point for us. We thought it would all be over,” Sophie’s father told me.
Du Feu pressed Sophie hard in cross-examination, asking:
“You were taking his hand and pressing it on to your vagina, weren’t you?”
“You deliberately exposed your bottom to the man in a provocative way, and asked him to have sex with you?”
“You were grabbing at his penis through his tracksuit bottoms and trying to stimulate him, weren’t you?”
“You asked him for £50 to have sex with you, I suggest?”
Sophie denied all these claims.
Alshimery’s barrister continued: “But you hadn’t been raped, had you?”
“No, I have been raped,” Sophie replied.
In 2022, Alshimery entered Britain on a small boat from France. When asked in court whether he had entered the country legally or illegally, he replied simply: “Illegally.”
Speaking through an Arabic interpreter, he told the court that he had come to Britain “to claim asylum [and] bring my family here”, claiming that he had no official papers or basic rights in Kuwait.
After Alshimery broke into the country, the Home Office housed him at the Holiday Inn Express hotel on Grenoble Road in Oxford. Here, he received £9 a week in pocket money and taxpayer-funded accommodation and meals.
He told police he was staying with friends at the time of the attack because the Home Office wanted to move him onto a barge. Contemporary reports show that residents of the Holiday Inn Express were then being transferred to the Bibby Stockholm, a barge in Dorset used to house asylum seekers.
In the days before Sophie was raped, pro-migrant campaigners opposed the transfers. ITV ran sympathetic interviews with residents, protesters demonstrated outside the hotel, and the charity Asylum Welcome published an appeal from the men.
Alshimery told police he had also objected, claiming that he feared “living on the sea or port” and offering instead to stay with friends in London.
