Officials in Dubai say those involved in a naked photo shoot on a balcony that went viral and sparked a crackdown in the city will be deported
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – Those involved in a nude photo shoot on a balcony of a skyscraper in Dubai will be deported, officials said on Tuesday, after the footage went viral and triggered repression in the Gulf domain. Arabic.
Dubai authorities arrested at least 11 Ukrainian women who posed naked in broad daylight along with a Russian male photographer on charges of public debauchery and pornography production. Earlier this week, images and videos of the naked women spread across social media and sent a shock wave through the emirate, where a legal code based on Islamic law, or Shariah, put foreigners in prison for more moderate crimes.
After an extraordinarily quick investigation, Dubai’s attorney general, Essam Issa al-Humaidan, announced that those responsible for the photo shoot would be sent back to their countries without giving further details. Dubai police refused to identify the detainees. More than a dozen women appeared in the widely shared video. Ukrainian and Russian authorities confirmed the arrest of their citizens on Tuesday, but the nationalities of the other detainees were not immediately known.
Rapid deportation is rare for Dubai’s legal system, an absolutely governed sheik. These cases usually go to trial or are tried before deportation.
“The public prosecutor ordered the deportation of the accused for their behavior contrary to public morals,” said al-Humaidan, adding that the group of women was accused of violating the country’s public decency law.
Dubai is one of the top destinations for influencers and worldwide Instagram models, who fill their social media feeds with stylish bikini selfies from the luxury hotels and man-made islands of the coastal emirate. But the city’s brand as a flashy foreign tourist destination has sometimes provoked controversy and clashed with the sheikh government’s strict rules governing public expression and behavior.
The scandal of the nude photo shoot came just days before Ramadan, the holiest month on the Muslim calendar, and when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky landed near Doha, Qatar, for an official state visit. Over the years, Dubai has increasingly promoted itself as a popular destination for vacationing Russians. Cyrillic signs are common in the main shopping centers in the city.
The Life, usually pro-Kremlin, tabloid identified the arrested Russian man as head of an information technology company in the Russian Ivanovo region, although his company denies that he has anything to do with the photo shoot. The Associated Press was unable to determine whether the detainees had legal representation or whether they contacted a lawyer.
Stanislav Voskresensky, the governor of Ivanovo, asked the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Russian ambassador to the United Arab Emirates to offer support to the Russian.
“We don’t abandon ours,” wrote Voskresensky on social media.
It is not the first time that foreign social media influencers, amateurs and professionals, have attracted unwanted scrutiny in the UAE. Earlier this year, while Dubai promoted itself as a great pandemic-friendly party paradise for travelers fleeing difficult blocks elsewhere, the stars of the European reality show were criticized for showing their poolside vacations in Dubai on social media. and for bringing the coronavirus home. Denmark and the United Kingdom later banned flights to the United Arab Emirates, as virus cases increased in the federation of seven sheikdoms.
Although the United Arab Emirates has recently made legal changes to attract tourists and foreign investors, allowing unmarried couples to share hotel rooms and residents to drink alcohol without a license, the Arab Gulf country’s justice system maintains severe penalties for violations of public decency law.
Nudity and other “obscene behaviors” carry sentences of up to six months in prison and a fine of 5,000 dirhams (US $ 1,360). Sharing pornographic material is also punishable by imprisonment and heavy fines. The majority state-owned telecommunications companies in the country block access to pornographic sites.
Foreigners, who make up about 90% of the UAE’s population of more than 9 million, have been arrested for comments and videos online, as well as for crimes considered benign in the West, such as kissing in public.
Dubai police often turn a blind eye to foreigners’ bad behavior – until they don’t.
———
Associated Press writer Daria Litvinova in Moscow and Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates contributed to this report.