DUBAI: A young British woman said she escaped an abduction bid after her non-alcoholic drink was spiked with drugs at a nightclub in Oud Metha last week.
Abu Dhabi resident Anna Johnson (name changed to protect identity), 23, had just seen off some friends around midnight and was moving towards another group when an Arab man offered to buy her a drink.
"I don't drink alcohol. In any case I was driving that night, so I politely turned him down. But he insisted and asked if he could get me a soft drink instead. So I said, ‘Okay, I'll have an energy drink'."
"It sounds as if I've been foolish, because obviously you shouldn't accept a drink from a stranger. And that's the message I want to get across. I lived in London through university and wouldn't have dreamt of doing anything like this because you know people there carry drugs. But here everybody assumes it is super safe. That's why I accepted the drink. I thought, ‘It's Dubai, it's not like somebody would put something in your drink in Dubai'."
Johnson couldn't have been more mistaken. She had barely taken a few sips when her mind went blank and she collapsed. "I was not conscious until the next morning and have no idea what happened in between apart from what I have been told," said Johnson, who was found unconscious in the club's toilet at around 2am. "I have a faint memory of lying on the bathroom floor. That's about it. I have no memory of how I reached there and who carried me out. Later, I found out it was a female bouncer. She recognised me and promptly called my mother in Abu Dhabi."
But just as the hotel staff was about to put Johnson in a taxi on her family's instructions, a man tried to whisk her away in a car.
"Fortunately he was stopped. The club management rang me the next day to check on me and they told me about this. They said it [spiked drinks] happens frequently. I spoke to the bouncer and she gave me a description of the man who tried to bundle me away. It matched the Arab man who spiked my drink."
Johnson has lived in the UAE for more than a decade now. She said: "I've never worried about things because I thought I was always in control, especially as I don't drink but this incident has scared me. I was not even dressed provocatively. I didn't fit the bill at all. I am lucky that nothing happened.
"People should remain alert when they go to a bar. Everything you do in America and in the UK, unfortunately, you have to do that here now. You must cover your bottle with a thumb, make sure you don't leave it unattended at any time and not accept drinks from strangers at all."
Johnson said she has not lodged a police complaint because she doesn't want to get into legal complications. "They will ask me if I have a alcohol licence. If I tell them I was not drinking they will ask what I was doing in a nightclub. I'd rather keep them out of it."
Last June, the British Embassy in the UAE issued an advisory warning about a tiny date rape pill used to spike drinks at nightclubs and hotspots across Dubai.
