Dubai: The story of an Asian father who attempted to stop rescuers from saving his drowning daughter is not new, as the incident happened 19 years ago, Dubai Police said on Wednesday.
Lt Col Ahmad Atiq Burqibah, Deputy Director of the Search and Rescue Department at the General Directorate of Transport and Rescue at Dubai Police, told Gulf News that the story of the girl was part of an interview for a website where he was asked to recall an incident that he cannot forget.
Soon after, the report went viral and was picked by foreign media as “an Asian father refusing to let male rescuers save his drowning daughter, because they would dishonour her”.
The officer said that it is normal for rescuers to remember such unique incidents. “It is a very old incident, but it created a lot of buzz in the media,” he said. The father did try to stop the rescue team — though he only delayed them — as they did pull the 20-year-old girl out alive and performed CPR on her but she could not be saved.
“No one has the right to prevent rescue teams from doing their job, not even a father, and it is also against the law,” Lt Col Burqibah explained.
The girl’s father was prosecuted for his actions.
Lt. Col Burquibah said three months ago, a two-year-old child was trapped in his parent’s car and the father did not have the key.
“The father, a GCC national, said ‘he will go get the spare key and there was no need to break the glass and it won’t be a problem for the child’. But after a while, we saw that it was getting hotter, putting the child at risk, so we broke the glass without asking the father and rescued the boy,” he added.
