Dubai, March 25: A police officer stood in the dock on Wednesday facing the charge of soliciting a bribe of Dh6,000 from a prisoner to get him drugs into his cell.
The 25-year-old Emirati police officer was on duty at the General Department of Penitentiary and Reformatory Institutions when he allegedly asked for the bribe. He denied the charge when he appeared in the Court of First instance. He also denied resisting a police officer who was trying to arrest him.
The Anti-Narcotics unit at the Dubai Police was informed by an inmate that the defendant was bringing drugs and narcotics into the prison for money, thus abusing of his position and breaching his professional duties.
The officers arranged to set him up and catch him red-handed on September 19 last year. They assigned one of them to contact the defendant and seek his help in delivering drugs to prisoners.
The defendant allegedly asked for Dh6,000 for the service, a major in the Anti-Narcotics unit told the prosecutors. He was arrested about at 2am on September 19 in the parking lot of a shopping centre in Jumeirah.He had collected the money from an undercover police officer for delivering the drugs to a prisoner at the Central Prison.
The undercover officer who is a sergeant with the Anti-Narcotics confirmed the statement of the major.
He claimed that the accused pushed him and resisted fiercely when he tried to apprehend him along with other members of the unit.
An inmate at the Central Prison, who tipped the police about the accused practices, alleged that the latter offered to bring him drugs for Dh6,000 before Eid al Adha last year.
He claimed that he was serving a sentence for drug abuse and he had a solid relation with the defendant who works as a police officer there.
The inmate then, after coordination with the anti-narcotics unit officers, asked for one gramme of hashish for Dh6,000. The police officer who later met the accused in plain clothes on the day of his arrest, pretended to be the inmate’s relative.
–Agencies