DUBAI // A music teacher forced a seven-year-old student to eat a piece of paper as punishment for being unruly, which caused the child to develop a fever and throw up, a court was told.
Prosecutors at the Dubai Court of Misdemeanours charged Bulgarian C P, 39, who worked at a private school, with deliberately endangering the life of a child under his care, which he denied.
C P said he was only joking and did not mean for the child to actually eat the paper.
Records showed that on March 26 this year, the student’s father reported his son’s teacher to the school’s administration after the boy suffered fever, vomiting and abdominal pain.
“When we were having lunch, he told me his stomach hurt and he couldn’t eat, then immediately he vomited. We gave him something to help ease the pain,” said HA, 39, a police officer who holds a Comoros Islands passport.
He added that the next morning his son, YA, went to school but a few hours later staff called and told HA the boy had been vomiting and his temperature was high.
“When we picked him up and his mother asked what he had eaten the day before, he told us that on March 24 the teacher made him eat paper,” said HA.
The boy continued to feel sick throughout the day and was taken to the Dubai Police Clinic. Staff there referred the third grade student to Latifa hospital.
“The doctor there told us that the boy’s condition was a result of eating paper,” said HA.
Following HA’s complaint, the school administration investigated the incident.
“C P confessed but said he was joking with the child and didn’t expect he would really eat the paper,” said M A, 44, the school’s principal, who reported the incident to police.
“Y A was making noise and folded his music task paper into a ball, so I told him if he didn’t want to learn music he can either eat the paper or throw it in the trash bin, but I didn’t see what he did with it,” C P said in police records, adding that when he noticed the child chewing paper he stopped him and made him throw it in the bin.
“I am a teacher and I don’t hurt my students,” C P said in records.
Y A said in police records he was playing with his classmates when the teacher got angry and forced him to eat the paper.
“He gave each one of us a piece of paper to write our music tasks on, but we made a mess and I made a ball out of my paper so he called me and told me to eat the paper,” said Y A.
The court found C P guilty and fined him Dh2,000.
salamir@thenational.ae
