DUBAI // Dubai’s Court of Appeal today has reduced a security guard’s three-year sentence to one year for human trafficking.
The court had convicted the Bangladeshi man of running a brothel and facilitating prostitution. Prosecutors claim that the man brought two women from Kyrgyzstan last July with the promise of good jobs.
The women arrived through Dubai International Airport then were taken to a flat in Barsha Heights, where they claimed they had been locked up and forced to work in a brothel.
One of the women sent her brother a WhatsApp message explaining what had happened and he contacted Kyrgyzstan consulate in Dubai.
When police raided the apartment on July 19, they discovered that it had been divided into small bedrooms. They reported that the defendant was behind a desk in the flat and four women were present.
Two consular employees were already there.
The defendant denied charges of human trafficking and running a brothel in both the Criminal and Appeal Courts.
"When I questioned him about the place he said it was a massaging centre," said an Emirati policeman.
The guard was sentenced to three years to be followed by deportation by Dubai Criminal Court but at the appeals, his term was reduced to one year.
The Bangladeshi man will still be deported after serving his term.
The women, aged 24 and 21, denied charges of prostitution, saying they were forced to work in the brothel. The women were found guilty of willingly working in prostitution and sentenced to six months in jail each to be followed by deportation.
The court also ordered the flat to be shut down.
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Profile
Name: Carzaty
Founders: Marwan Chaar and Hassan Jaffar
Launched: 2017
Employees: 22
Based: Dubai and Muscat
Sector: Automobile retail
Funding to date: $5.5 million
Farage on Muslim Brotherhood
Nigel Farage told Reform's annual conference that the party will proscribe the Muslim Brotherhood if he becomes Prime Minister.
"We will stop dangerous organisations with links to terrorism operating in our country," he said. "Quite why we've been so gutless about this – both Labour and Conservative – I don't know.
“All across the Middle East, countries have banned and proscribed the Muslim Brotherhood as a dangerous organisation. We will do the very same.”
It is 10 years since a ground-breaking report into the Muslim Brotherhood by Sir John Jenkins.
Among the former diplomat's findings was an assessment that “the use of extreme violence in the pursuit of the perfect Islamic society” has “never been institutionally disowned” by the movement.
The prime minister at the time, David Cameron, who commissioned the report, said membership or association with the Muslim Brotherhood was a "possible indicator of extremism" but it would not be banned.
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Sheikh Zayed's poem
When it is unveiled at Abu Dhabi Art, the Standing Tall exhibition will appear as an interplay of poetry and art. The 100 scarves are 100 fragments surrounding five, figurative, female sculptures, and both sculptures and scarves are hand-embroidered by a group of refugee women artisans, who used the Palestinian cross-stitch embroidery art of tatreez. Fragments of Sheikh Zayed’s poem Your Love is Ruling My Heart, written in Arabic as a love poem to his nation, are embroidered onto both the sculptures and the scarves. Here is the English translation.
Your love is ruling over my heart
Your love is ruling over my heart, even a mountain can’t bear all of it
Woe for my heart of such a love, if it befell it and made it its home
You came on me like a gleaming sun, you are the cure for my soul of its sickness
Be lenient on me, oh tender one, and have mercy on who because of you is in ruins
You are like the Ajeed Al-reem [leader of the gazelle herd] for my country, the source of all of its knowledge
You waddle even when you stand still, with feet white like the blooming of the dates of the palm
Oh, who wishes to deprive me of sleep, the night has ended and I still have not seen you
You are the cure for my sickness and my support, you dried my throat up let me go and damp it
Help me, oh children of mine, for in his love my life will pass me by.
