Dubai: A man has been accused of offering a Dh400 bribe to a policeman after he was caught distributing cards advertising massage services in JBR.

The 24-year-old Chinese suspect, B.W., who had been placing the cards on car windscreens at Jumeirah Beach Residence (JBR), had already escaped arrest twice. When he was stopped by police he presented Emirates ID cards on two different occasions that belonged to other people, claiming they were his. He managed to break free two times between January 5 and 19.

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.

Prosecutors charged B.W. with using someone else’s Emirates ID card and offering a bribe to a policeman to release him.

“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,” said the suspect before presiding judge Ezzat Abdul Lat at the Dubai Court of First Instance on Monday.

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

“We were patrolling JBR’s The Walk area when we spotted the defendant putting massage cards on windshields around 9pm. Considering that he was doing an illegal thing, we stopped and 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. However, the suspect escaped. We stopped him a second time on January 19 doing the same thing, but he escaped towards the beach. On January 23, we spotted him for the third time distributing massage cards … this time we trapped him then arrested him,” said one of the policemen.

The defendant handed a written defence to presiding judge Abdul Lat, who adjourned the case until May 15.