DUBAI // A football coach who was jailed for three years for sexually abusing a 15-year-old boy he trained lost his appeal against the sentence.
The 35-year-old Indian denied five counts of sexual assault as well as charges of issuing threats, inciting sin among teenagers and possessing child pornography, but was convicted of all of them.
On Wednesday he lost his appeal for a reduced term as Dubai Court of Appeal upheld the three-year sentence, to be followed by deportation.
The court was told that he took pictures of his victim naked then threatened to post the pictures on Facebook if the boy did not comply with his wishes.
The coach also sent other children pornographic images to incite them to commit sin and he stored several pictures of naked children with the intent to use them to blackmail his victims.
“I took no pictures and I didn’t threaten or blackmail anyone,” the coach said.
“The phone that has the pictures on it doesn’t belong to me. It’s for a friend who flew to his homeland and left it with me.”
The coach befriended the 15-year-old Indian boy on Facebook about four months before the assault in October last year.
“He started training me and my friends and used to drive [us] to and from home but, on October 15, after he dropped everyone else [off], he took me to a sandy plot behind a school then locked the doors and forced me to take my clothes off,” the boy said.
The coach threatened him with the pictures and abused him before warning him not to tell anyone or he would post the images online, the boy said.
The parents of the boy reported the incident to police.
The Emirati policeman who arrested the coach said several images of naked children were found on the coach’s smartphone.
Prosecutors and police said the man confessed to all charges during investigations.
salamir@thenational.ae
