Dubai: A housemaid has been accused of stealing Dh30,000 in cash from her sponsor’s house shortly after she requested to be sent back to her country.

The 29-year-old Ethiopian housemaid, V.S., was said to have asked her Emirati sponsor to cancel her visa and send her back home three months after she started work.

After the sponsor agreed to do so, he discovered that she had stolen money from his house.

Prosecutors charged V.S. with robbing her sponsor in July.

However when she showed up before the Dubai Court of First Instance, she pleaded not guilty and denied stealing.

“Who stole the money then? What about the receipts that confirm that you wired money from an exchange house to your homeland?” presiding judge Fahd Al Shamsi asked the suspect.

“I did not steal the money … it was another maid who worked for the same sponsor. She is the one who took the money and wired it to Ethiopia,” replied the defendant.

“How did the money exchange house get a copy of your passport then? And why would she do so?” the judge asked V.S.

“She had been staying here illegally and she could not use her passport in order not to get arrested. She took my passport and used it to wire money to her family in Ethiopia. She is the one who stole the money … I did not take anything,” argued the defendant in courtroom three.

The Emirati sponsor testified to prosecutors that the incident happened shortly after V.S. asked them to cancel her residency and send her back home. “My sister went to get the money to buy her a return ticket … the money was missing. When we confronted her, she denied taking any money. When we asked her about the receipt that she had from the exchange house to wire her Dh1,000 salary, she said she didn’t take one. The suspect claimed that she went with my sister to wire her salary from the exchange house … my sister waited in the car while she went alone to the exchange house. Thereafter I asked the driver and he told me that he took V.S. to the exchange house to wire money. We discovered that she had wired thousands of dirhams. I asked her to return the money that she had stolen and that I would buy a return ticket immediately and send her back to her country. She refused and also stopped working. Then I took her to the police station where she was locked up,” he said.

A ruling will be heard later this month.