Policeman jailed for sex attack on woman in Dubai hotel room

Officer took Colombian woman for dinner but she didn't realise he was plying her with alcohol and she woke on a hotel bed and he jumped on her.

Powered by automated translation

DUBAI // A policeman has been found guilty of sexually assaulting a woman but was acquitted of threatening to kill her if she rejected his advances.

The 28-year-old officer, who holds a Comoros Islands passport, denied the charges and told Dubai Criminal Court last month that he was a military man who knew right from wrong.

The court convicted him of sexual assault and sentenced him to three months in prison after the incident in October last year.

He was with the woman at a hotel in Al Rashidiya on October 27 after inviting her to dinner by a WhatsApp message.

The Colombian woman, 24, said they had dinner and drinks but she did not know any of them contained alcohol and, after they left, she felt dizzy and fainted in his car then woke up to find herself on a bed in a hotel room.

“He was standing next to me. I asked him what I was doing there on the bed and not in my house and he said it was OK and that he won’t touch me,” the woman said.

Moments later, he jumped onto the bed and started kissing and touching her, she said. He then ripped off her dress and threw her back on to the bed when she tried to escape.

“He bit my lips and wanted to rape me but I told him I had my menstrual cycle,” she said.

“He didn’t believe me and had me prove it to him.”

She said that she was pressured into pleasuring him and then, at his insistence, she hugged him as he fell asleep. “When he fell asleep, I covered myself and ran out of the room, went home then to hospital and, afterwards, to police,” she said.

The officer was arrested and he told investigators he was surprised to wake up in the morning and find her gone.

“We went to the hotel after she insisted we go and, when I told her I will sleep on the floor, she wanted me next to her on the bed,” he said. “It all happened because she wanted it.”

He will be deported after serving his jail term.

salamir@thenational.ae