Soldier sentenced over blackmail photos, Dubai court rules

Emirati called woman 200 times in one day and posted inappropriate letter on the door of her family home.

DUBAI // A soldier who threatened to show naked photographs of a woman and tell people that they had been having sex if she did not reconsider his marriage proposal was sentenced in absentia to two years in jail. Emirati MM, 21, was convicted by Dubai Criminal Court with six charges on Wednesday morning. He was not present in court to enter a plea last month and was again not there to hear the verdict.

He was found guilty of threatening fellow Emirati SD, 24, to publicly say they had been in a sexual relationship and that he possesses naked pictures of her, if she did not meet him to talk again about his marriage proposal to her.

He was also convicted with writing two letters in which he breached SD’s modesty and posting one of them on the door of the woman’s family home.

Another charge the soldier was found guilty of was breaching a female’s modesty by opening the woman’s car door and trying to flirt with her after stopping her car in the middle of the road.

The court also found him guilty of defaming SD by pretending to have been with her intimately and claiming to having her underwear; calling her more than 200 times in one day; and posing danger to the woman’s life by stopping his car suddenly in front of hers while she was driving.

The woman testified that he proposed to her but she refused him because he was unemployed.

“He then started harassing me,” she said in court records, adding that he would wait for her outside her work then follow her wherever she went.

“He posted a handwritten letter on my family’s house door in which he wrote inappropriate things about me,” said the woman, adding that her brother-in-law saw it first and gave it to her.

“He had texted me an image of this letter so I knew it was him and I went to police and reported him,” she said.

The incidents happened in February and March of last year.