Sheik cleared in videotaped torture

Sheik Issa bin Zayed al-Nahyan a member of the Abu Dhabi ruling family was cleared on Sunday of torture and rape charges of an Afghan man and raised new questions over human rights.

The judge reading the verdict at a court in the United Arab Emirates said that the images on the footage first made public on ABC last year, could not be verified as Sheik Issa bin Zayed al-Nahyan.

But a lawyer for the sheik, a son of UAE founder Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, said his client was found to have “diminished liability” because, he said, two former business associates drugged him beforehand, then took the video to extort money from him.

The two men Lebanese American brothers Bassam and Ghassan Nabulsi who first made the footage which has embarrassed the royal family of the UAE were sentenced to five years in prison and were also given a fine. for what the judge said was drugging, recording and publishing a video, and blackmail. The judge said the reasoning behind the verdicts would be published at a later date.

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A Nepalese security guard shown in the video was also acquitted. But a Syrian national was given one year in jail for the beating, and an Indian and a Palestinian were each sentenced to three years for sodomizing the man with a stick.

Mohammed Shah Poor, the Afghan grain trader abused in the video, showed no reaction when the verdicts were read. In the footage, which dates to 2004, the man is seen struck with an electric cattle prod, beaten with whips and a plank of wood with a nail in it, and driven over by a car at a desert location near the oasis of al-Ain.