Dubai: A man who was caught distributing cards advertising massage services at Jumeirah Beach Residence (JBR), has been cleared of offering a Dh400 bribe to a policeman to let him go.

The 24-year-old Chinese suspect, B.W., was said to have been stopped by police while placing cards on car windscreens at JBR, and asked to present his Emirates ID.

Prosecutors charged the suspect with bribing the policeman to let him go and using someone else’s Emirates ID when he was asked to present identification.

The Dubai Appeal Court acquitted B.W. of bribery after he had been sentenced to three months in jail by the Court of First Instance.

In June the primary court fined B.W. Dh400 and jailed him for three months to be followed by deportation.

The suspect appealed the primary verdict and contended before the appeal court that he did not bribe the policeman.

“I did not use anybody’s ID and I did not bribe the policeman. After the officer stopped me, he searched my pockets. He found the ID in my wallet and the money in my pocket. I did not present the ID or offer him any money,” argued B.W. when he defended himself.

Citing lack of evidence, presiding judge Eisa Al Sharif overturned the primary ruling and cleared B.W. of any wrongdoing.

Two policemen testified that they had stopped the suspect on two different occasions, during which he used Emirates IDs that belonged to other people. He managed to escape two times between January 5 and 19.

Court records said the third time the policemen foiled his attempt to escape before taking him into custody on January 23. One of the policemen claimed that B.W. had offered him Dh400 to let him go.

The policemen claimed that they were tasked to arrest wrongdoers or suspicious individuals during the Dubai Shopping Festival around the JBR area.

“We were patrolling The Walk when we spotted the defendant putting massage cards on windshields around 9pm. When we asked him for identification, he presented an Emirates ID card and when we checked at the station [over the phone] we discovered that it belonged to someone else. There was an obvious age difference. Then he took out Dh400 from his pocket and presented it to me … I understood from his hand signals that he was offering me the money to let him go because he could not speak Arabic or English. The suspect escaped. He escaped the second time we stopped him on January 19. We trapped him and arrested him on the third occasion on January 23,” said one of the policemen.

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