ABU DHABI // A man dressed himself in an abaya and niqab so he could enter a hospital room and attempt to rape a woman, the Criminal Court heard on Wednesday.
MF, from Yemen, was caught by a security guard who spotted him as he entered the hospital reception.
“He was dressed like a woman covered from head to toe, but he walked like a man so I became suspicious,” said the guard.
By monitoring MF’s movements on CCTV screens, he was tracked to the third floor.
When he entered a room, the guard asked a female nurse to open a door for him.
Inside the room, he said he saw the defendant on top of a housemaid who worked for one of the patients.
“She was lying on her stomach on a couch crying, and he was on top of her,” said the guard.
The court asked if they were both fully dressed, the witness said they were, and MF was wearing the abaya and the niqab.
“I recognised him from his voice, we used to pray together and discuss Islam because I’m a Muslim too,” said the guard. “He has been visiting the hospital for around five months to room 111.”
MF then fled the room and ran towards the stairs.
“So I surrounded him from the other side and found him at the bottom of the stairs. He had stripped off his abaya and veil at that point.”
He said he confronted him, and the defendant immediately said: “It wasn’t me.”
MF then tried to drive away on a motorbike but the security guard told him to stop because police were on their way.
“He started saying ‘please don’t do this to me we are brothers’,” added the guard.
MF denied the charges in court. He said he knew the guard well as he would often visit his brother, who was being treated in the hospital.
“I knew a number of nurses and sisters there as I used to translate for my mother and brother,” he said.
“There was no dispute or any problems between me and the witness. We only used to talk about Islam .”
“But what he said about what happened is not true,” he said.
The case was adjourned until September 7 to appoint a defence lawyer for MF.
hdajani@thenational.ae