DUBAI // An apartment building watchman was sentenced this morning to one year in prison, followed by deportation, for molesting a two-year-old girl while showing her parents a flat for rent.
The Dubai Criminal Court of First Instance found NB, 21, from India, guilty of undressing the girl and touching her inappropriately.
The girl’s parents were visiting the Plaza Residence building in Oud Metha on October 28, 2010, to see an apartment they were planning to rent.
Prosecutors say the watchman took the parents inside the apartment, and while they were looking around, he took the girl away to the stairwell and molested her. When she started crying, according to prosecutors, he hit her hand.
The girl’s father, BM, a 40-year-old manager at a private company, told prosecutors he noticed his daughter had disappeared.
He went looking for her and found her crying, records showed. He picked her up and asked her why was she crying, and she told him she had been molested.
BM told prosecutors he calmed down his daughter, then called Al Rafaa Police Station. “Police came in less than 15 minutes but the watchman had disappeared,” he said.
When police found the watchman they asked him where he had been in the past half an hour, he told them his superior had ordered him to go to the building’s 10th floor.
When the father asked him what was he doing with his daughter, he replied: “ I did not touch her”, although molesting the girl had not yet been mentioned, prosecutors said. The father told prosecutors that he saw redness on his daughters hand when he found her.
salamir@thenational.ae
