ABU DHABI // A woman who crashed her car into a vehicle full of undercover police officers thought she was rescuing her friend from a group of men, a court has been told.
Prosecutors said L, an Emirati, reversed into the police car, endangered the officers and intentionally caused a traffic accident. She denied the charges in court.
Her lawyer, Tarek Al Serkal, on Monday said that she was at home when her friend and fellow defendant R M called to be rescued.
R M, who was not in court, was stopped by undercover CID agents at a remote area in Sharjah during the night.
They had received a reports of a young woman who had run away and thought it might be her.
“She was driving L’s car, so she gave them L’s name,” Mr Al Serkal said.
She called L and told her she was surrounded by men and was scared that they would attack her. She asked her friend to rush to her rescue.
“L is a married woman and has children,” Mr Al Serkal said. “She went quickly to rescue her friend.”
The lawyer said that on her way she called police operations to report the incident.
When she arrived she found the car and officers, but did not know they were police.
“They only had the top light on, and even I [could] go to Dubai and buy one for my car,” Mr Al Serkal said. He said they did not show their identification.
“This is an era where harassment [has become] widespread,” Mr Al Serkal said.
“They were two women at midnight in a remote area.
“She was in a state of terror and emergency to rescue her friend, so when she reversed she was too nervous and accidentally crashed into their car.”
She said she did not mean to crash into the car, endanger policemen’s lives or cause the crash.
Mr Al Serkal requested that the court seek the police call register records to check that she had called them twice.
The first call was to report what her friend had told her when she was on her way to the rescue, and the second when she went back to the scene to pick up the car R M was driving.
The case was adjourned.
hdajani@thenational.ae
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Retirement funds heavily invested in equities at a risky time
Pension funds in growing economies in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East have a sharply higher percentage of assets parked in stocks, just at a time when trade tensions threaten to derail markets.
Retirement money managers in 14 geographies now allocate 40 per cent of their assets to equities, an 8 percentage-point climb over the past five years, according to a Mercer survey released last week that canvassed government, corporate and mandatory pension funds with almost $5 trillion in assets under management. That compares with about 25 per cent for pension funds in Europe.
The escalating trade spat between the US and China has heightened fears that stocks are ripe for a downturn. With tensions mounting and outcomes driven more by politics than economics, the S&P 500 Index will be on course for a “full-scale bear market” without Federal Reserve interest-rate cuts, Citigroup’s global macro strategy team said earlier this week.
The increased allocation to equities by growth-market pension funds has come at the expense of fixed-income investments, which declined 11 percentage points over the five years, according to the survey.
Hong Kong funds have the highest exposure to equities at 66 per cent, although that’s been relatively stable over the period. Japan’s equity allocation jumped 13 percentage points while South Korea’s increased 8 percentage points.
The money managers are also directing a higher portion of their funds to assets outside of their home countries. On average, foreign stocks now account for 49 per cent of respondents’ equity investments, 4 percentage points higher than five years ago, while foreign fixed-income exposure climbed 7 percentage points to 23 per cent. Funds in Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and Taiwan are among those seeking greater diversification in stocks and fixed income.
• Bloomberg
