Dubai, October 27: A laundryman and a company agent were on Monday charged in the Court of First Instance with attempted human trafficking.
They are accused of attempting to sell a runaway housemaid to a police informant for Dh4,000.
According to court records, the 37-year-old company agent sheltered the woman after she absconded from her sponsor. They then reportedly engaged in a sexual relationship, which resulted in the woman’s pregnancy.
To get rid of the pregnant woman, the man sought the help of his 40-year-old friend, who worked in a laundry.
A sergeant in the Organised Crimes Section of the General Department of Criminal Investigation told the prosecutors that the police came to know from an informant that a Bangladeshi man was intending to sell a woman for Dh4,000.
“We coordinated with our informant and tracked the calls he was receiving from the laundryman,” the sergeant said.
The CID asked the informant to negotiate the price with the Bangladeshi. “The seller insisted on charging Dh4,000. We told the informant to set a date to buy the woman so that we could catch the Bangladeshi redhanded,” the sergeant added.
The informant was supposed to meet the seller, laundryman, around 9pm on July 2. But the latter kept changing the timing.
“He began making excuses and pretended that he did not have the woman or he wanted to collect the cash in advance and then deliver the woman on the following day,” the sergeant stated.
About 4pm on July 3, the informant finally managed to meet with the seller in the parking lot of a supermarket in Al Nahda.
“He came and asked for money, but our informant insisted he wanted to take the woman first,” the officer stated. He also said that the second defendant, the company agent, then showed up along with the ‘woman-on-sale’ at the same venue.
The laundryman and the woman stepped into a car driven by another police informant. The other defendant stayed out of the car talking with the main informant, the potential buyer.
After the laundryman collected the money, the police arrested him along with his accomplice. The laundryman admitted to the cops that he wanted to sell the woman to help his friend.
The laundryman was to get Dh2,000 from his friend for facilitating the sale of the woman.
When the police questioned the housemaid, she said that she was brought that day to the parking on the pretext of being handed over to a new employer. “He, the company agent, told me that he had found two part-time jobs for me as a housemaid. He later handed me over to the other defendant,” the woman said.
She knew she was sold when she saw the laundryman collecting the money from the men in the car.
The woman is facing the charge of having sex out of wedlock.
–Agencies