Khaberni - A Dubai misdemeanor court punished a person of Asian nationality with two years imprisonment and deportation after convicting him of stealing fuel worth 20 Dirhams from a motorcycle’s tank used for «order delivery», left by its driver in front of the company he works for.
The court also sentenced him to one more month of imprisonment for consuming alcoholic beverages.
In detail, the Dubai misdemeanor court sentenced the accused, a 39-year-old, to two years and one month imprisonment, and fined him 20 Dirhams, with deportation after his conviction for stealing fuel from a motorcycle and using it without the owner's permission, in addition to being intoxicated in a public place.
The case files indicated that the incident occurred in the Al Quoz Industrial Area Four when the victim left his motorcycle outside the company premises for a few minutes without removing its key and went in to pick up an order.
During this brief period, the accused took advantage of the night's darkness and the quiet of the area, managed to start the motorcycle and drove it away.
According to the court’s findings, the accused did not just drive the motorcycle; he headed to another location near a shopping center, where he stopped it, extracted the fuel inside using a tube, and transferred it to his own motorcycle after realizing his fuel was depleted, before leaving the motorcycle and departing the scene.
The investigations revealed that the accused was intoxicated at the time of the incident, noting that he consumed alcoholic beverages on a public road, which he admitted, confessing to consuming a significant amount before wandering around the area.
The victim stated during the investigations that he left the motorcycle for a few minutes, and when he came out of the company's premises, he was surprised by its disappearance, prompting him immediately to notify the police, who later found it, pointing out that he discovered the theft of the fuel that was in the tank, and the investigations confirmed the incident’s accuracy and the accused’s involvement in it.
The accused also admitted in the investigations to committing the incident, explaining that he initially thought the motorcycle was his due to his condition, before later discovering otherwise. Despite realizing the motorcycle was not his, he stole the fuel, which the court regarded as evidence of the criminal intent in the theft crime.
The court confirmed in its ruling that the criminal intent in theft is established when the perpetrator knows that he is embezzling property owned by someone else without their consent, intending to own it, and that this intent does not need to be independently proven but is inferred from the circumstances of the incident and the accused's behavior, which was established in this case.
The court noted that it has the authority to evaluate the evidence and deduce the correct scenario of the incident from the totality of what was presented to it, pointing out that the accused's confession, along with the victim's statements and the investigations, formed interdependent and sufficient evidence to convict the accused.
The court explained that the crimes of theft and unauthorized use of the vehicle are closely linked and inseparable, as they are products of a single criminal activity, which necessitates imposing the severest among the penalties according to the law, while the intoxication crime is punished with a separate penalty.
And the court concluded by convicting the accused and sentencing him to two years of imprisonment for the crimes of theft and unauthorized vehicle use, and an additional month for the intoxication charge, alongside fining him the value of the stolen money and deporting him from the country after serving the sentence.
