Duo win appeal in rape bid case

Dubai Prosecutors have lost their appeal against two men who were cleared of trying to rape a woman in a flat after they picked her up from a five star hotel at 3.30am.

In November, the Dubai Court of First Instance cleared the Syrian suspects, D.D. and K.I., of attempting to have forced sex with the Moroccan woman whom they had picked from a hotel and had offered to drive home in August.

The duo were cleared for lack of corroborated evidence.

Prosecutors appealed the primary judgement and asked the Appeal Court to overturn the acquittal and punish the suspects.

Presiding judge Eisa Al Sharif rejected prosecutors’ appeal and confirmed the duo’s innocence.

Records said the duo told the woman that they needed to change their clothes at their flat in Al Badiya area before taking her to the place where she was staying in Rashidiya.

The woman agreed to accompany them to their flat, according to records, instead of waiting alone in the car while they changed.

Up in the flat, the woman alleged that the two men forced her into the bedroom and attempted to have sex with her, before she saved herself from being raped and fought her way out of their flat.

The suspects strongly refuted the woman’s claims and accused her of fabricating the allegations that they attempted to rape her.

They pleaded not guilty and denied using physical violence and assaulting her.

The woman had alleged to have fought the men back when they beat her and tried to rape her and absconded with partly ripped clothes.

She had claimed to prosecutors that she accepted the suspects’ offer to drive her to her place for a lack of taxis at that late hour [3.30am] after she left the hotel.

“I visited the UAE for tourism and to look for an investment opportunity. I was waiting for a taxi at the hotel’s entrance when the suspects’ car stopped in front of me. K.I. told me that I wouldn’t find a taxi at that late hour and offered to give me a ride to Al Rashidiya. The other suspect drove. They parked in a building where they claimed to me that they had to change their clothes. I went up with them to the flat as they looked old and I did not suspect that they would harm me,” the woman claimed.

The Syrian men asked the appellate court to dismiss prosecutors’ appeal and to dismiss the woman’s ‘unsubstantiated claims’.

The appellate ruling remains subject to appeal before the Cassation Court within 25 days.