DUBAI // The lawyer of a woman sentenced to seven years for threatening to blow up the Public Prosecution building with a bomb belt has asked that her client be acquitted and described the incident as a cry for help.
“She did not mean to harm anyone, she just wanted to get the attention of officials to help her,” Muna Al Khaja said at Dubai Court of Appeal on Wednesday.
Zulfiya Hamraeva, 33, from Uzbekistan, and Emirati M Y, 28, who was sentenced to two years for aiding and abetting her by making the device, were both appealing against their sentences.
The Emirati’s lawyer, Eisa bin Hayder, told the court that the main evidence to prove his innocence is with Etisalat.
“I requested that the Criminal Court contact Etisalat and seek a list of messages and calls made by Zulfiya to my client, his wife and sister, in which she threatened to frame him,” said the lawyer.
“This is clearly an evidence of innocence but the court ignored my request and I hope that your honourable court won’t do the same.”
After this statement, the court asked the lawyer for the mobile phone numbers of the client, his wife and sister.
At midday on September 1 last year, Hamraeva walked up to the reception desk of the prosecution building accompanied by her son and opened her abaya to reveal the bomb belt.
She claimed her son was the result of an affair with an Emirati and threatened to detonate explosives unless a paternity test was carried out. After nearly 14 hours of negotiations, she was taken into custody and the bomb belt was later found to be an elaborate fake.
The alleged father of the child, J S A, said he met Hamraeva in 2003 and, 10 days later, she claimed she was pregnant by him.
She filed a case against the Emirati in Ajman, to prove his paternity, but she lost and was jailed for a month.
Then, in 2007, she filed another case in Sharjah but the court refused to hear her based on the earlier Ajman ruling.
J S A said that, on August 10, Hamraeva had sent him a picture of the explosive belt but he did not take her threats seriously.
salamir@thenational.ae
