Frenchwoman comes home after being held six months in UAE on sex charges
Frenchwoman Touria Tiouli stands in front of the Dubai courthouse
BRIVE, France (AFP) A 39 year-old Frenchwoman held for six months in the United Arab Emirates, where she had been accused of prostitution after she made rape allegations against three men, flew home last Sunday.
"I'm dazed, I still can't believe it," said Touria Tiouli, a divorcee of Moroccan origin, as she arrived in her hometown of Brive in central France.
Tiouli, who has a 14 year-old son, said she had gone to Dubai to do accounting work for a French firm.
She said she had been raped by three men who offered to drive her home from a disco in Dubai last October. Tiouli filed charges the following day but the men, UAE citizens, accused her in turn of being a prostitute.
Tiouli was then remanded in custody for five days on a charge of extra-marital relations, then ordered to stay under house arrest in a Dubai hotel at her own expense.
For six months, her case was shuffled back
and forth among several Dubai jurisdictions.
Her lawyers, who pleaded not guilty on her behalf in a lower court,
failed in their bid to have a criminal court hear her allegations
that she had been raped.
An appeal court scheduled a new hearing on 27 April and Tiouli said she did not know why she had been allowed to leave.
She said her lawyer called her on last Wednesday, telling her she could collect her passport from the prosecutor's office.
"I had to wait until Saturday to get my exit visa," she said. "As soon as I got it I bought my ticket and got onto the plane."
A support committee set up in France to help Tiouli had deplored the French authority's failure to take proper action in defence of a French citizen.
Dubai, one of seven city-states, which make up the United Arab Emirates, enjoys a comparatively liberal reputation in the Gulf, but Islamic tradition can still be strictly applied.