A British woman has managed to escape her three-month jail sentence in Dubai by flying back to the UK, despite Dubai authorities imposing a no-fly ban.
She was given the sentence in her absence in a court hearing on Monday, after fleeing the country.
Asa Hutchinson, aged 22, was charged with assault and theft following an alleged drunken altercation with a Swedish businessman in 2016.
According to the MailOnline, she has managed to escape by obtaining a new British passport andboarding a plane back to London.
“Asa left via the airport [in Dubai] and was fortunate not to have alerted the system [over the ‘no-fly’ court order],” a source close to Ms Hutchinson told MailOnline. “She was able to do this because she had replaced her passport. This is not usually possible.”
Ms Hutchinson, who was an account manager for a global transportation company in the UAE, was arrested following an incident in Dubai’s Al Fattan Currency House, where she was accused of being involved in an altercation with a Swedish businessman.
She and three friends were implicated when a drunken row erupted after the group took photos of a sleeping Swedish man.
One of the young group woke up the sleeping man by hitting him in the face,before another member stole his glasses and the fight escalated.
According to a medical report, the victim suffered a broken nose, finger and toe as well as scratches and bruises and was left with a one percent permanent disability as a result of an injury to his left nostril.
Taking pictures of someone without their consent and being rude to another person are both classed as illegal in Dubai and are punishable by jail time.
Ms Hutchinson, who lived and worked in Dubai, claims she was only a witness to the fight and is in no way to blame. However, since the other members of the group were never convicted as they had already fled Dubai, she says she was left "in the firing line."
She earlier lost her job after being arrested, and authorities seized her passport.
Ms Hutchinson claimed the authorities did not listen to her side of the story, adding: "once the man made his complaint it was taken as fact."
She said she had little opportunity to defend herself as "the police are not interested in anything I have to say,” and her lawyers claimed that she was forced to sign papers, only written in Arabic and incomprehensible, confessing to the alleged crimes. She says that she was threatened with an immediate jail sentence if she did not sign.
Her father Iain has pleaded for "some compassion" for his daughter, commenting that "Asa is a young girl in a foreign country, being subjected to a legal system not at all like what we are accustomed to."
The young woman’s future remains unclear. Although she is back living in the UK, in her hometown of Chelmsford, Essex, she still faces arrest if she returns to Dubai, and extradition if she lands in any of the neighbouring Gulf countries.