DUBAI // A UN report claims that the UAE may have the highest murder rate in the region – but authorities have refuted the statistics.
According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), there were 235 intentional homicides in the UAE in 2012, higher than any other GCC country.
This was equivalent to a rate of 2.6 killings for every 100,000 of the population.
Police and crime experts, however, said the figures presented in the Global Study on Homicide report were wrong.
“You find this sort of number [of murders] in Iraq and Afghanistan, not the United Arab Emirates,” said Col Jamal Al Jallaf, director of the crime-monitoring department at Dubai Police.
Col Al Jallaf said he did not have access to UAE-wide statistics, but said the numbers in the UN report were far beyond what he expected them to be.
“This number is very high, it’s too high,” he said. “I am sure you will never find this number in the Emirates. Never.”
The UN’s UAE statistics were said to be compiled from World Health Organisation (WHO) figures.
WHO compiles data based on the number of deaths and causes of death from each of its member countries.
For countries from which complete data is not available, projected statistics are compiled based on a formula.
It was not clear whether this method was used to calculate the UAE figures.
A spokesman for UNODC was unavailable yesterday, and calls to the Abu Dhabi field office of the organisation went unanswered.
The statistics stated that even though Saudi Arabia has a much higher population than the UAE – 28.3 million compared with 9.2 million – there were fewer murders in the kingdom in 2012: 234, or a rate of just 0.8 per 100,000 of the population.
During the same period Kuwait had 12 murders, a rate of 0.4, while Qatar had 23 cases, a rate of 1.1. In 2011, Bahrain had seven murders, with a rate of 0.5, while there were 34 in Oman, a rate of 1.1.
Iraq had 2,628 murders - a rate of 8 per 100,000 of the population, while Afghanistan had 1,948 murders, or 6.5 per 100,000 people.
The country with the highest murder rate of all was Honduras, which had 7,172, or 90.4 murders per 100,000 of the population.
The United States had 14,827 murders, representing a rate of 4.7.
The UK had 653 murders in 2011, a rate of 1 per 100,000 of the country’s population.
This appeared to be the first time the UAE had been included in the report, as statistics for earlier years were not given.
The National asked for exact figures from the Ministry of Interior, but they were not immediately available Sunday.
Criminology experts in the Emirates said that the numbers were counterintuitive.
“I don’t think these are the real statistics,” said Ahmad Falah Al Omosh, professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Sharjah. “It is a very low rate, nothing like this at all. It must be wrong information.
“People here are living in a peaceful culture, where there is a lot of tolerance. The law here is very good and it’s safe for people. The majority of murders that happen here are by expatriates who bring their disputes from their own countries when they move to the UAE.
“It reflects a very small amount of the population.”
According to the report, 86.8 per cent of the UAE’s murder victims were men, and 13.2 per cent were women.
That was slightly different from the international average, which was 80 per cent male. Data on the circumstances of death and whether firearms were involved was not available for the UAE.
mcroucher@thenational.ae
