Dubai, April 27: A ten-year-old girl managed to escape from two workers who tried to rape her as she was riding a motorcycle near her house, a court heard on Monday.
The British girl went to a sandy location near her place in Jebel Ali on her motorcycle on January 10 but she was intercepted by two Bangladeshi workers.
One of them held her, covered her mouth, kissed her on the cheek and asked his friend to pull her pants down. She kicked them and sped away on her motorcycle.
The Jebel Ali police could nab only one while they are still looking for the other.
The arrested man, aged 27, was a construction worker. He went on trial in the Court of First Instance on the charge of attempted rape. The incident reportedly happened outside his labour accommodation.
The girl’s father, a manager aged 44, told prosecutors that on January 10, his daughter went missing for a few hours after she left home on her motorcycle.
About 6pm, the manager found his daughter at the entrance of the villa complex where they live. She was crying and the security guard was with her.
She recounted to him how two men had attacked her while she was looking for mice in the sandy area near their place. By that time, the police arrived as his wife had already called them.
An Emirati police officer said that on January 14, one of his sources informed him about talk among workers in Sports City near Jebel Ali about a foreign woman who was sexually harassed.
“We had earlier sent a unit of Criminal Investigation Department (CID) officers to patrol the area searching for suspects in a separate harassment incident,” the officer said.
They arrested two workers. “One of them admitted that he tried to rape the girl by holding her and covering her mouth. The other worker said he was standing at a distance and did not see what was going on.”
The girl recognised the person who had held her.
–Agencies