A 21-year-old American student who was supposed to transit through Dubai to return to New York from Istanbul was sentenced to a year in prison for simply touching a customs officer’s arm after a search.
“In addition to the humiliation and trauma at the hands of airport staff, Elizabeth suffered for months from having to stay in an expensive country, pay expensive lawyers and miss her university studies,” he said. The founder of the organization Detained in Dubai, Radha Stirling, according to the New York Post.
Elizabeth Polanco De Los Santos, 21, was on her way home on July 14 when airport staff in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where she was supposed to be in transit for a few hours, allegedly stopped her to conduct a search.
Due to a recent operation, the girl was wearing a waist compressor at the time. She was taken to a private room where agents removed her, causing her pain, according to her mother’s statement to the organization.
A New York student, Elizabeth Polanco De Los Santos, was sentenced to a year in a Dubai prison for allegedly assaulting and insulting an airport security guard during a connecting flight. She had only planned a quick stopover and was stuck in Dubai for months. #Travel #Dubai pic.twitter.com/wnW9khMDUd
— US Crime (@OfficialUScrime) October 3, 2023
Except that the agents refused to help her when they put the garment back on with “many pins that need to be stretched at the edges to attach small thin needles close to the body” and instead laughed at the half-naked student.
She then “gently” touched the arm of one of them who was standing in front of the door to lean into the opening and “desperately” call out to her friend for help.
“I felt uncomfortable and scared. “I felt really hurt,” she told the organization, according to American media.
Without this simple gesture, a complaint of “assault and insult” would have been filed against her and she would have been held in a room for several hours before being released after signing a form in Arabic.
It was then that she learned she no longer had the right to leave the country as she waited for a court hearing that would have sentenced her to a year in prison on Monday after several months of being held in the country and forced to pay was for an expensive hotel room.
“She is under incredible stress which is affecting her physical and mental health, affecting her entire life and leaving long-term scars. That’s just no way to treat visitors. It is scandalous,” concluded Radha Stirling.
She would be the second American to face such problems in the United Arab Emirates, while 29-year-old Tierra Young Allen was reportedly forced to pay $1,300 to regain her freedom to travel after spending months in the country Land was stranded for yelling at a rental car employee, according to NYP.