Dubai A housewife won her appeal and had her one-year imprisonment reduced to three months in the case of torturing her maid and causing her partial deafness.
In February, the Dubai Court of First Instance sentenced the 33-year-old Jordanian housewife to one year in jail for torturing her 28-year-old Indonesian maid by banging her head against the wall and shoving a pair of scissors in her ear causing her partial deafness.
However, the Jordanian woman appealed her primary ruling and pleaded not guilty before the Appeal Court.
In her defence argument before the appellate court, the 33-year-old defendant refuted the accusation of torturing her maid over three years.
The Indonesian maid absconded from her sponsor’s residence and took refuge at the Indonesian Consulate in January 2016.
Citing grounds of leniency, presiding judge Saeed Salem Bin Sarm overturned the defendant’s one-year jail term and reduced it to three months in jail.
The defendant’s lawyer, Ali Mosabah Dahi argued before the appellate court: “She did not report [the torture] to the police and stayed working for my client for three years … she waited for my client to go on leave to her country before the 28-year-old absconded from the house and took refuge at the Indonesian Consulate,”
Dahi accused the maid of fabricating the criminal case against his client out of malice after raising a dispute over her salary.
According to the appellate ruling, presiding judge Bin Sarm also cancelled the deportation order against the defendant.
“The maid’s claims were fabricated and the injuries [described in the forensic examiner’s report] are old injuries and not recent. She had quarrelled with the defendant over how much her salary should be … then she brought this case out of malice,” argued Dahi.
An Indonesian diplomat took the maid to a hospital for a medical check-up before lodging a police complaint, said records.
The forensic examiner said the victim sustained partial hearing disability and other injuries due to the beating. The housewife had strongly denied being responsible for inflicting the five per cent permanent disability on the victim by shoving the scissors in the maid’s ear.
The maid alleged during questioning that the defendant assaulted her in February 2016, but the housewife was visiting her family in Jordan between January and March that year, defended the lawyer.
“The maid gave an inconsistent and unfounded statement. Meanwhile, when she was asked why she didn’t report her sponsor to the police earlier, she replied that she did not have the freedom to move and did not have a mobile phone,” argued Dahi.
The appellate ruling remains subject to appeal within 23 days before the Cassation Court.
