Woman Jailed in Dubai After Reporting Rape

24-year-old Norwegian charged for sex outside marriage, drinking
By Ruth Brown,  Newser Staff
Posted Jul 21, 2013 5:08 PM CDT
Woman Jailed in Dubai After Reporting Rape
Marte Deborah Dalelv.   (AP Photo/Kamran Jebreili)

Marte Deborah Dalelv was looking to have her alleged attacker arrested when she reported she had been raped by a colleague. Instead, the 24-year-old Norwegian woman working in Qatar was arrested herself, and has now been sentenced to 16 months in prison on charges of sex outside of marriage, making a false statement, and illegal consumption of alcohol, reports CNN. Dalelv says she was on a work trip in Dubai and had been drinking with colleagues at a bar. She asked a male colleague to escort her back to her hotel room for safety reasons, but she says the man instead led her to his room, where he pulled her inside and raped her.

Dalelv called the cops the next day, and was taken to a police station. But there, she says, the officers didn't believe her. "They asked me, 'Are you sure you called the police because you just didn't like it?' I said, 'Well of course I didn't like it,'" she says. They kept her in jail for four days without explanation. When she was informed of the charges for sex and drinking, a manager told her to say the sex was voluntary, and the charges would disappear. Instead, the cops added a new charge: making a false statement. Dalelv remains out of prison while an appeal is pending. She says she is speaking out to warn other foreigners in the Dubai. " Dubai seems like a Western city, but what a lot of tourists don't know for example that it's not legal for them to drink alcohol," she says, per Reuters. (More Dubai stories.)

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