A cleaner working at Dubai International Airport stole a sim card and posted pictures of the phone's owner on social media.
The Pakistani man, 28, came across the lost handset on an Emirates flight, and handed it in to the lost and found department, but kept the sim.
Details of the incident were heard in court in Thursday as the cleaner was sentenced to six months in jail.
The court heard that on September 15 last year, the victim, an American woman, left the Samsung on the aircraft after she arrived for a stopover in Dubai from Angola, while en route to Lebanon.
Emirates later contacted the passenger after she arrived in Lebanon and returned the phone to her.
“The woman reported that her memory card was missing. Then, she found that her pictures had been posted on a Facebook account," a 23-year-old police officer testified.
How the woman came across images of her was not fully detailed in court, but they appear to have been spotted by a friend of hers.
The accused was quickly tracked down and said he not steal the phone as he feared of being searched by airport security.
“The cleaner confessed to the crime,” said the officer.
He will be deported on his release.
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Cast: Cillian Murphy, Emily Watson, Eileen Walsh
Rating: 4/5
The Africa Institute 101
Housed on the same site as the original Africa Hall, which first hosted an Arab-African Symposium in 1976, the newly renovated building will be home to a think tank and postgraduate studies hub (it will offer master’s and PhD programmes). The centre will focus on both the historical and contemporary links between Africa and the Gulf, and will serve as a meeting place for conferences, symposia, lectures, film screenings, plays, musical performances and more. In fact, today it is hosting a symposium – 5-plus-1: Rethinking Abstraction that will look at the six decades of Frank Bowling’s career, as well as those of his contemporaries that invested social, cultural and personal meaning into abstraction.
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Forced Deportations
While the Lebanese government has deported a number of refugees back to Syria since 2011, the latest round is the first en-mass campaign of its kind, say the Access Center for Human Rights, a non-governmental organization which monitors the conditions of Syrian refugees in Lebanon.
“In the past, the Lebanese General Security was responsible for the forced deportation operations of refugees, after forcing them to sign papers stating that they wished to return to Syria of their own free will. Now, the Lebanese army, specifically military intelligence, is responsible for the security operation,” said Mohammad Hasan, head of ACHR.
In just the first four months of 2023 the number of forced deportations is nearly double that of the entirety of 2022.
Since the beginning of 2023, ACHR has reported 407 forced deportations – 200 of which occurred in April alone.
In comparison, just 154 people were forcfully deported in 2022.
Violence
Instances of violence against Syrian refugees are not uncommon.
Just last month, security camera footage of men violently attacking and stabbing an employee at a mini-market went viral. The store’s employees had engaged in a verbal altercation with the men who had come to enforce an order to shutter shops, following the announcement of a municipal curfew for Syrian refugees.
“They thought they were Syrian,” said the mayor of the Nahr el Bared municipality, Charbel Bou Raad, of the attackers.
It later emerged the beaten employees were Lebanese. But the video was an exemplary instance of violence at a time when anti-Syrian rhetoric is particularly heated as Lebanese politicians call for the return of Syrian refugees to Syria.