Dubai
Two men lost their appeals and face life imprisonment for kidnapping and gang-raping a manager in a car after they threatened to kill her.
Three Bangladeshi men, 30-year-old M.A., 33-year-old A.H. and M.R., who remains at large, lured the Filipina manager to their car and they had forced sex with her in December 2014.
In March, the Dubai Court of First Instance sentenced M.A. and A.H. to life in jail for kidnapping the woman using deception, raping her, stealing her mobile phone and cash, threatening to kill her and then selling her to another woman for Dh3,000 to make her work in prostitution.
M.R. was sentenced in absentia for life in prison. M.A. and M.R. appealed their life imprisonment and sought to have punishment overturned or reduced before the Appeal Court.
Presiding judge Saeed Salem Bin Sarm rejected the defendants’ appeal and upheld their life imprisonments.
The two will be deported following the completion of their punishments. The Filipina testified that she was waiting for a taxi after work at 7.30pm when M.A. stopped and offered to drive her home at Dubai Motor City.
“I sat in the back and he drove off. He stopped at the side of the road and the other defendants entered the car. A.H. sat beside me while M.R. sat in the passenger seat. Three minutes later, M.R. jumped to the back and they squeezed me. They groped me. I realised that they intended to have sex with me … I asked them to take all my money and let me go but they didn’t … they raped me. They threatened to kill me when I tried to resist them. They prevented me from jumping out of the moving vehicle and beat me. M.A. stopped the car near Dubai Police’s headquarters until another car arrived and parked beside us. A woman came into our vehicle and she asked me to go with her to work in prostitution … but I refused. She gave me the choice of staying with the defendants or going with her. I was afraid of staying with the men and went with her to a nearby villa. The woman locked me up inside a room … later the villa’s watchman raped me,” she claimed.
The Filipina waited until everybody in the villa had fallen asleep, according to her statement, before she escaped from a small opening in the kitchen wall. She waited under a truck until sunrise before she asked a worker to take her to the police.
A policeman said the defendants were identified through the car’s number plate that was picked up by the station’s surveillance cameras.
The appellate ruling remains subject to appeal before the Cassation Court within 28 days.