Dubai: A visitor has been sentenced to three months in jail for molesting a 13-year-old boy watching the dancing fountains show at the Dubai Mall.
In the September 2017 incident, the 45-year-old Omani visitor was accused of taking advantage of the crowd to stand very close to the Saudi boy and repeatedly lean into his body. The boy tried to move away several times, but the man continued his behaviour.
A Sudanese security guard saw the man acting in an inappropriate manner and alerted the boy’s mother whose attention the boy was trying to get. She could not hear her son due to the loud music.
The boy told his mother that the man had touched him in an indecent way.
The guard then escorted the accused to the police office at the Mall.
The Dubai Court of First Instance found him guilty of molesting the boy and sentenced him in absentia after he missed his trial.
According to the primary ruling, the accused also faces deportation.
The Sudanese guard testified to prosecutors: “While accompanying the defendant to the police office at the mall, he claimed to me that he was seduced by the devil and apologised for what he had done.”
The defendant is entitled to a retrial after he surrenders or is apprehended as per the UAE’s Criminal Procedures Law.
