DUBAI // A one-night stand earned a man and a woman a year in prison for having consensual sex, a court ruled today.
The Dubai Court of Misdemeanours also sentenced the man to an extra month for drinking alcohol.
MA, 44, from Morocco, SS, a 29-year-old Russian woman, met at a bar in a five-star hotel on Sheikh Zayed Road in April 2010.
Prosecutors said the two shared a taxi to MA's hotel apartment in Bur Dubai, where they had sex twice. Then SS somehow fell from the room's first-floor window.
MA then picked up SS, who had suffered cuts and bruises, put her in a taxi and gave the driver Dh20 to take her home. But the cab driver, suspicious of her injuries, flagged down a police patrol car.
Records said that MA was drunk, as he had consumed several bottles of beer and glasses of whisky at the bar.
But MA's and SS' testimony on the events of the night differ from each other.
MA said he took her phone number at the bar, and later arranged to meet her at his apartment. He told prosecutors that after they had sex, he went to the kitchen to get some water.
"When I returned, I saw her jumping out of the window in her underwear and T-shirt," he said in records.
MA testified that he brought her back upstairs, washed her face and dressed her in a pair of trousers before sending her home in a taxi.
SS, however, said she had been "beaten up by a Moroccan man", her roommate testified.
At Rashid hospital, SS said that when she left the bar, AM followed her and got into a cab with her without her approval.
When they arrived at his building, SS said, he dragged her out of the taxi and forced her up to his flat, where he massaged her body with lotion before having sex with her, records show.
"I screamed, but no one helped me, so I could not resist him," SS testified.
SS was not in court today; she fled Rashid Hospital before she was supposed to be released.
salamir@thenational.ae
