Dubai: A cleaner, who took money from bankers to pay for their parking and tampered with Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) parking tickets using snickered numbers, was handed suspended imprisonment.

An RTA inspector had suspected a parking ticket placed on the dashboard of a car in front of the bank in Naif in August before his hand-device system exposed that the ticket’s details were forged.

The inspector called the police to investigate the forged ticket.

When a policeman entered the bank to inquire about the car owner, who had the forged parking ticket on the dashboard, it was discovered that the vehicle belonged to an Emirati woman.

The woman later told the policeman that she had paid Dh26 to the 30-year-old Bangladeshi cleaner, just like many other bank employees, to purchase a seven-hour parking ticket and post it on her dashboard.

When confronted by the woman’s claims, the cleaner admitted that he had put the ticket on the dashboard.

The parking ticket was found to have been tampered with as the original timing had been covered with snickered numbers.

The Dubai Court of First Instance convicted the Bangladeshi defendant of forging RTA parking tickets and using them.

The court handed the defendant, who had pleaded guilty, a three-month suspended imprisonment on grounds of leniency.

However, the accused will be deported according to the primary judgement that remains subject to appeal.

The Emirati woman said that she and coworkers always paid money to the defendant to place parking tickets on their cars.

“On that day, I gave the defendant Dh26 to pay for my seven-hour parking while I was in office. At 11am, the policeman came in and asked about the owner of the car that had my number plate. He told me that the parking ticket on my car had been forged … I explained to him that I had paid the money to the defendant to put the tickets. When I asked him how had the forgery happened, he took out the ticket from his pocket and showed me that the numbers had been tampered with snickered numbers,” she testified.

The RTA inspector testified that the forged ticket he had discovered at 10am only covered the parking time of an hour and not three hours as it was supposed to expire at 12.22pm (as per the forged timings on the forged ticket).