Wudeema case: Father to serve life in jail

Dubai: Dubai’s highest court has rejected prosecutors’ appeal for capital punishment for an Emirati father who confined his eight-year-old daughter and tortured her to death.

“I wonder whether the verdict today is going to be in my favour or the media’s favour,” Hamad Saud Al Shirawi, Wudeema’s father, told the Dubai Cassation Court early on Monday morning when he gave a brief defence argument.

Wearing the red-striped white prison dress usually worn by convicts serving a life sentence, Al Shirawi asked the presiding judge in courtroom 22 to dismiss prosecutors’ appeal to stiffen his life imprisonment to a death sentence.

In Monday’s ruling, the Cassation Court confirmed the life sentence against Al Shirawi and his partner in crime, his countrywoman girlfriend Al Onoud Al Ameri.

The Emirati couple was convicted of confining Wudeema and torturing her to death using different forms of physical violence and emotional and mental torture.

The father and his partner were also found guilty of causing 10 per cent permanent disability to Al Shirawi’s second daughter, Meera, whose uncle freed her from the flat where she and Wudeema were being confined in Al Warqa.

During Monday’s quick trial, the father denied prosecutors’ allegations that he had confined his daughters by providing the five-judge bench with a sharia court ruling confirming that he was the sisters’ custodian following his divorce from his ex-wife.

In June, the Dubai Appeal Court commuted Al Shirawi’s death sentence to life in jail and upheld Al Onoud’s life sentence.