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A drunk man found guilty of assaulting a policeman who rescued him from a partially burning car will spend a year in prison.
The Supreme Criminal Appeals Court struck down a plea filed by the Public Prosecution, asking judges to issue a harsher sentence against the 39-year-old Saudi man.
In June, the High Criminal Court convicted him on five charges related to the April incident, and fined him nearly BD100 for damaging property.
He was charged with assaulting policemen while on the line of duty, publicly denigrating five civil employees, being drunk in public, causing a disturbance to others and intentionally destroying government property.
On the night of the incident, policemen were dispatched to Demistan after a report was received about a vehicular fire, and arrived to find a patch of grass burning under the car.
The man who was sitting in the passenger’s seat – the defendant – was reportedly seen in an ‘unnatural’ state, and refused to co-operate with officers when they asked him to exit the vehicle so the fire can be brought under control.
He first resisted being brought out of the car, and later pushed and cursed at a Civil Defence officer who was in the process of extinguishing the fire.
Officers testified that he kicked and hit reinforcement policemen who tried to remove him from the scene.
He also sat in the middle of a road in an intoxicated trance, they said.
Another group of policemen who managed to get the Saudi under control and transported him to a police station, said he continued insulting them.
He was then taken from the police station to the Interior Ministry’s building to have his blood alcohol level tested, when he allegedly attacked the officers once again.
The Saudi used his metal handcuffs to hit an officer on his arm and chest, and damaged his colleague’s phone. The test results revealed that the defendant was in an intoxicated state.
While he had an outburst in the ministry building, he also reportedly damaged a policeman’s mobile phone and the interrogation room door.
The GDN earlier reported that the man’s lawyer presented an alternative narrative at appeals hearings, claiming that the Saudi was the real victim in the incident and that he was ‘brutalised’ by policemen.
The lawyer alleged that the officers slammed his client’s head against the car window and that he had sustained injuries all over his body.
He had argued in a defence memo, addressed to judges, that it was strange that there was no security camera recording of the incident, despite it happening in a public place.
zainab@gdnmedia.bh
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