Dubai: A jobless woman created a scene and broke out in tears in court on Sunday when she denied the charge of smuggling and possessing 3.8kg of marijuana.
Law enforcement officers at Dubai International Airport stopped the 31-year-old Malian woman once the scanning device detected two pieces of marijuana in her luggage in August.
Drugs prosecutors accused the 31-year-old of smuggling and possessing drugs.
The woman pleaded not guilty and seemed solid when she entered her plea before the Dubai Court of First Instance on Sunday.
“Did you know that you were carrying a banned substance?” presiding judge Fahd Al Shamsi asked the suspect.
Thereafter, the woman started mumbling and crying and repeatedly said she did not know.
“Who gave you the substance?” the presiding judge asked her.
Suddenly the woman started crying heavily and started explaining in an unclear voice: “I did not know … someone gave me the substance at the airport and told me that his sister would pick it up from me at Dubai Airport. I did not know what it was. I did not know that it was a banned substance. I just carried it.”
The defendant contended before presiding judge Al Shamsi that she did not take any money to carry the substance to Dubai.
When the jail warden, who accompanied the suspect to court, approached the Malian woman to take her out of the court, the suspect suddenly covered her face with her headscarf and collapsed in tears on a bench.
An airport customs officer claimed to prosecutors that the woman was taken into custody once the scanning device revealed that she was carrying a banned substance in her luggage.
“Upon confronting her with the findings, the suspect claimed that the seized substances did not belong to her,” the officer testified to prosecutors.
A ruling will be heard next month.
