Please let mum come home, begs daughter of woman facing jail in Dubai
Web slur aimed at ex’s new wife
‘I feel less hopeful of her return’
THE teenage daughter of a British woman facing jail in Dubai for calling her ex-husband’s new wife a ‘horse’ issued a heart-breaking plea for clemency last night.
In an emotional letter to the citystate’s leader, 14-year- old Paris Shahravesh said: ‘Please let my mum come home your Highness’.
Her mother Laleh Shahravesh is due to appear before a judge on Thursday over Facebook comments from 2016.
The saga began three years ago when Pedro dos Santos, a Portuguese banker, left Miss Shahravesh after 18 years of marriage for a younger woman.
Miss Shahravesh, from Richmond in west London, admits to lashing out on the social network after learning that Mr Santos had married his lover.
She claims she wrote two comments – from the UK – in Farsi where she called her ex-husband an idiot and his new Tunisian wife ‘a horse’. Mr Santos’s second wife Samah al Hammadi, 42, later reported Miss Shahravesh to Dubai police over the comments.
The 55-year-old was detained along with Paris when she landed at Dubai Airport to attend the funeral of Mr Santos last month.
She faces up to two years in prison and a £50,000 fine for allegedly breaching the country’s strict cyber- crime laws and is staying in a hotel with orders not to leave the United Arab Emirates ahead of Thursday’s hearing.
Last night, Paris described her terror at being interrogated by police officers in a foreign country at the age of 14. In a letter to Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, she described her fear of losing her mother, just a week after the unexpected death of her father from a heart attack at the age of 51.
The teenager, who is currently being cared for by relatives in the UK, wrote: ‘The police forced us to sit in the immigration waiting room for four hours, as they tried everything that they could to transfer my mother to the police station. The police refused to listen to my mother because she was crying, so they began to shout at her constantly, telling us both not to cry.
‘Finally, at midnight my mother was given a document written in Arabic which she did not understand and was given no choice but to sign in order for us leave the airport police station.’
The teenager became even more fearful about her mother’s plight after police confiscated her passport and banned her from leaving the country.
‘I cannot emphasise enough how scared I felt, especially after losing my father just a week before, as I was having to worry about losing my mother as well,’ she said. ‘Yet even though I felt terrified on the day that we arrived, the sick feeling in my stomach only became worse.’
She described how her mother was later told to sign another Arabic document which officials claimed was her ‘statement’.
But the words on the page amounted to a ‘mere paragraph’, and did not appear to match her mother’s two-hour account, Paris said. The teenager said that they were once again ‘intermittently yelled at’ and then ‘told that we would be helped, before being told that there was nothing that they could do’.
She added: ‘The next day I had to leave Dubai without my mother, and without the closure that I had wished to gain from attending my father’s funeral in Dubai. But I had no other choice other than to leave as I had school to attend.
‘I have not seen my mother in 23 days, and with every passing day, I feel less hopeful of her return. I ask kindly: please, please return my mother’s passport, and let her come home.’
Miss al Hammadi said she was pursuing the case because she believed it is her duty ‘to honour her late husband and protect him from further defamation’. But the PE teacher indicated she may drop the case for the welfare of his daughter Paris.
‘One of the last messages he tearfully gave me before his death was that he deeply loved his daughter,’ she said. ‘I am willing to withdraw this case to honour my husband’s love for his daughter.’
However, last night Miss Shahravesh’s family accused Miss al Hammadi of being ‘vindictive’ for reporting the comments to the police at all.
A source close to the family said: ‘The fact of the matter is that this woman hasn’t dropped the case.
‘She has turned Paris’s life into a nightmare because she hasn’t seen her mother for almost a month. The girl has had to deal with the sudden loss of her father and is now without her mother. This is utterly vindictive behaviour. I can’t believe the Dubai authorities are entertaining this as a crime.’