Inmate "beaten to death" at Bur Dubai police station

A British tourist was beaten to death by officers in a Dubai police station after being arrested for swearing, it was claimed yesterday.

Lee Bradley Brown, 39, was on holiday at a £1,000-a-night hotel in the Arab state when he was thrown into a filthy cell.

Police sources say he was ‘badly beaten up’ by a group of police officers, leaving him unconscious on the floor.

Inmates told how they watched officers bundle him into a body-bag and drag him out of the building.

During Mr Brown’s six days in Bur Dubai police station, guards refused to give him enough food and water and did not let him see a lawyer, it is alleged.

His sister learned about the attack when she received a phone call from an inmate on Sunday, claiming her brother had been beaten.

The prisoner found her phone number on a photocopy of her brother’s passport which had been left behind in the cell.

She contacted the British Embassy in Dubai, and on Monday an official was sent to visit Mr Brown at the police station.

But the official was turned away by an officer who claimed Mr Brown did not want to see him and had ‘declined consular assistance’.

His sister, who did not want to be named, received another phone call from the inmate saying he had seen her brother’s body being taken out in a body-bag.

A source told the Daily Mail last night: ‘He suffered a really bad beating which must have caused some terrible internal injuries.

‘The poor bloke stood no chance at all. At one stage he was thrown against the concrete wall of a cell and landed badly.

‘Then the guards tried to hush it up and pretend nothing had happened.’

-- more here: Daily Mail: Briton 'beaten to death' in a Dubai police cell after being arrested for swearing


Link found via detainedindubai on twitter

Life in prison for cough syrup

There is an absolutely disgusting story in today's gulf news:

"Dubai: A pharmacist is serving a life sentence for selling a bottle of controlled medicine for Dh100, a judicial official told Gulf News.

The Indian pharmacist, identified as A.Sh. is in his mid-40s and had been working for a private hospital in Dubai. He is undergoing his punishment at Dubai Central Jail after being convicted by a court of selling a bottle of Actifed Compound Linctus for Dh100.

A.Sh. told Gulf News that he had been working as pharmacist for a private hospital in Dubai for nearly seven years and had never sold any medicine without prescriptions.

"An Emirati HIV patient identified as Khalid used to come to our hospital for treatment and doctors prescribed for him Actifed Compound Linctus," he said.

A.Sh. recalled the day when he was arrested saying that Khalid came to the hospital pharmacy asking for the medicine."

Life in prison for a bottle of Actifed Compound Lictus (known in the UAE as a controlled drug and in other countries as horrific 'cough syrup') that doesn't even contain enough codeine (10 mg) to be abused.

Keeping in mind the person that bought the cough syrup was actually prescribed to have cough syrup in the first place makes this story all the more ridiculous.

Your View

Yet another publication favors the same local spot: "Al Wathba inmates get internet access.".

After reading "Five-star quality food for prisoners", one could seriously doubt that the Force Majeure behind the publisher and the beautifying initiatives is one and the same.

(Last paragraph of the "National moment for newspaper launch")

Personal opinion: Not the right choice for new national paper.

Le-Huy on Al Wathba prison

Al Wathba prison has long been regarded as a bad prison (unforunately, uaeprison.com is against the moral, social, economic and ignorance-is-bliss values of the UAE, so anyone on Etisalat may aswell go stare at a wall for a few hours)

Recently Cat Le-Huy, who was arrested and subsequently pardoned for having 0.03 grams of hashish was pardoned and deported; but not before sharing a cell with DJ Grooverider for an amount of time in Al Wathba prison... His description is quite revealing.

"Mr Le-Huy was held in the airport detention facility in Dubai and later the Al Wathba prison where he shared a cell with Radio 1 DJ Grooverider, who was convicted to four years in jail for carrying a small amount of cannabis on February 19.

In both he met a large number of European residents, who also claim to have been wrongfully imprisoned, including three others from the Belsize and Swiss Cottage area.

"A very small percentage of them were guilty of trying to bring something across but by and large they were innocent. These people are sitting in a foreign prison and are losing things in their life like their jobs or mortgages. During the Dubai shopping festival we were getting about nine foreign nationals sent in every day.

"Most others weren't serious criminals, but one was a paedophile, which was particularly nasty. We had a 15-year-old and a 17-year-old put in the prison as well and they weren't kept separate from him. We took care of them but one night he kicked down the door of another guy's cell - it was pretty disturbing."

The men were also being held in unsanitary conditions, according to Mr Le-Huy, which made health problems a growing problem.

Mr Le-Huy continued: "There was a hepatitis and HIV scare at the detention centre.

"You get tested when you arrive and there were three men found positive, but it took the guards to sort out who they were and move them.

"There was also some drugging. One guy came in he was screaming all day and all night and kept everyone up. He would just lie in the middle of his urine and faeces. They put him in solitary but he got better and said he had been injected by guards.

"Another guy came in with the same thing - we fed him food and water through the bars, but he didn't improve.

"The bathrooms were absolutely filthy - the toilets were overflowing. There was a Salmonella outbreak, but the prison denied it was happening."

His final say on the situation sounds like a pretty good suggestion...
"Mr Le-Huy is now supporting the campaigns to free others he met there and hopes pressure will build on the country to change its legal system.

"You have to be level-headed about things," he said. "There will be cases of people wrongly imprisoned in any judicial system, but if you give an unbiased system, which allows representation, it will limit it. Dubai has a promising future if it can maintain its Islamic views, while also bringing in some sort of representative justice system. It has to realise what it is putting people through - something needs to change."


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