“I was arrested without any warrant and without being informed of the charges against me on 26 February 2013. I was arrested by agents of the UAE state security forces – headed by Mr Hazza bin Zayed Al Nahvan – while I was transiting through Dubai on my way home from Thailand.
I was stopped by a security guard at border control. After being searched and questioned, I was asked to come to the police station to sign a document confirming that the authorities had interrogated me. At first, I refused, and asked to call my embassy, but when the guard told me that I would be able to make a phone call in the police station, I finally agreed to follow him. He brought me outside the airport and I was forced to enter a GMC car, where they blindfolded and handcuffed me.
I didn’t have any communication with the outside world. They didn’t allow me to contact a lawyer, nor to call my embassy or my family despite my numerous demands. One day, I was very thirsty, and they gave me an old bottle. I could see that there was something in the water, but I drank it because my throat was really dry. Thirty minutes later, I started to become talkative, and I couldn’t control myself, so I realized that the water had been drugged. Then, they began asking me about the situation in Qatar, my country. They said that I was financially supporting illegal organisations in the UAE and asked me why I was travelling so frequently to the UAE. I answered that I had family there, but they continued to interrogate me.
After driving for many hours, I arrived at an unknown location. There, I was forced to change my traditional thawb into a prisoner’s uniform in front of them, then they placed me in an isolated cell. At the time, I could not have imagined that I would spend the following eight and half months there being tortured.
After that, they immediately put me in a room and started to beat me, interrogating me about my relationship with individuals in the UAE and the Qatari government. This was the first of several torture sessions.
During my detention, I was allowed to leave my cell only to go to the bathroom, and every time I was blindfolded. I was exposed to severe acts of torture. The guards beat the soles of my feet and repeatedly punched my face. They deprive me of sleep, threatened to electrocute me, remove my nails, hang me and bury me in the prison graveyard. I remember the guards telling me that even if they killed me, nobody would know where I was.
Medical services were limited in the prison, and conditions of detention were poor. After two weeks, I started to become depressed, and I wasn’t able to sleep or even to think. After 14 days, they came to my cell and asked me to put on my national dress. I was really happy because I thought that they were going to release me. Instead, they took me to a room where I saw people sitting with a video camera. They told me that they were going to take a video of me and show it to the sheikh, promising me that I would be released the following day. In the beginning, I refused, thinking that this video would be published in the media, but in the end I had to accept. Unfortunately, I wasn’t released, and instead I was brought back to my cell.
On 4 November, my trial began, and nine hearings took place between then and 3 March 2014, when the court handed down its verdict condemning me to seven months of imprisonment on the sole basis of papers I had to sign during my detention without being granted right to read them.
I was severely tortured and detained incommunicado. This detention has had a lot of negative effects on me. They destroyed my image and I still suffer physically and psychologically. For this reason, I think it is my responsibility as a victim to speak out, to tell people what happened to me and denounce these violations for those who still are detained in UAE prisons”
