Ten-year sentence for man who raped waitress

An Emirati was posing as policeman working to identify illegal workers when he 'arrested' the Filipina woman.

DUBAI // An Emirati man who posed as a policeman, kidnapped a Filipina waitress and took her to an apartment where he raped her, was sentenced yesterday to 10 years in prison by the Dubai Criminal Court of First Instance. The defendant, NM, 28, stopped three Filipina women at 2am on January 9 this year near the Iranian Hospital claiming to be a CID officer looking for illegal expatriate workers. He asked the women to show him their work permits and two of them complied. The victim, EM, 27, did not have her work permit with her, but showed him a copy of her passport instead.

The defendant then pretended to speak on the radio with his superiors who purportedly asked him to wait until he could verify EM's passport details. NM then told the victim that her passport details were not registered with immigration authorities and he had to arrest her and take her to the central jail. In her written statement, EM said the defendant then drove her to the Satwa district of Bur Dubai where he stopped several passers-by and asked for their work permits. He told her he had been instructed to take her to a women's shelter.

On the way, EM got a phone call from her boss's husband who asked to talk to NM. The defendant asked the caller why EM's employer had not provided her with a work permit and told him once EM's papers were sorted out he would drive her back to work. EM said that NM drove up to a cluster of three buildings and asked her to go up to a first-floor apartment in one of the buildings. At that point EM began to doubt that NM was a policeman. In the apartment, the defendant changed from his kandoura into shorts and sat beside EM on a couch and asked her to give him a massage.

The victim said she did so because she was afraid of him. The defendant then asked her to have sex with him and when she refused, he forced himself on her. According to her roommate's written statement, the victim managed to get away from her captor and arrived home by 6am "exhausted and in an awful state". When her roommate asked her what had happened, EM told her she had been raped. Both went to the police to report the incident.