Dubai court reduces sentence for soldier who blackmailed woman after spurned marriage proposal

DUBAI // A soldier’s two-year sentence handed in absentia for threatening to show naked photos of a woman if she did not reconsider his marriage proposal was reduced to three months in a retrial.

Emirati MM, 21, was convicted by Dubai Criminal Court of six offences. However, he was not present in court to enter a plea nor was he present to hear the verdict.

Under UAE law, someone sentenced in absentia is granted a retrial when they appeared.

He was found guilty of threatening his fellow Emirati SD, 24, with publicly saying that they had been in a sexual relationship and that he possesses pictures of her naked if she did not meet him to talk again about his marriage proposal.

He was also convicted of writing two letters in which he breached the woman’s modesty and then posted one of the letters on the door of her family’s house.

The soldier was found guilty of breaching a female’s modesty by opening her car door and trying to flirt with her after forcing her to stop her car in the middle of the road, an act for which he was also found guilty of endangering her life.

In addition, he is guilty of defaming the woman by pretending to have been with her intimately and claiming that he possessed her underwear, as well as being guilty of abusing telecommunications by calling SD more than 200 times a day.

The victim testified that the soldier proposed to her but she refused because he was out of work. “He then started harassing me,” she said in records, noting that he would wait for her outside her work then follow her everywhere she went.

“He posted a handwritten letter on my family’s house door in which he wrote inappropriate things about me,” said the woman, adding that her brother-in-law saw it first and gave it to her. “He [MM] had texted me an image of this letter so I knew it was him and I went to police and reported him,” she said.

The incidents happened in February and March of last year.