Marcus Fakana has been jailed in Dubai (Image: PA)
I suppose the judge who this week jailed a British teenager for enjoying a holiday romance – a harmless little fling which wouldn’t raise an eyebrow here in the UK – thought he was being lenient.
After all, one year in prison for doing something which in the United Arab Emirates is illegal and carries a maximum 20-year term could be seen as a token slap on the wrist.
But here, the sentence is utterly shocking. Because under British law, European law, US law (dammit, most countries’ laws) 18-year old Marcus Fakana, from Tottenham, has done absolutely nothing wrong.
He was with his parents on a once-in-a-lifetime “dream” family holiday to Dubai. They’d been saving for years for it – only to see that dream convulse into a full-on nightmare.
Marcus, right, fell for a 17-year-old British girl, also on holiday in Dubai this September, with her own parents. And she fell for him. In the sun and warmth of the Arabian gulf, one thing led to another and they enjoyed what can only be described as the above – a holiday romance. They slept together, happily and consensually, as they may well have done had they met under summer stars in, say, or .
But in Dubai, the age of consent is 18. Technically, Marcus was breaking the law and the unnamed girl was his “victim”.
But the young couple had no idea this was the case. Theirs was an entirely innocent breach of local statutes. And, indeed, no one else had the faintest idea they had slept together.
Until the girl’s parents came home, and her mother discovered personal messages between the teenagers on her daughter’s iPhone. And what did she do?
She personally contacted Dubai police and “dobbed” Marcus in, knowing perfectly well he was still there with a few days’ holiday remaining. The boy was promptly arrested, charged and, this week, jailed.
What a vindictive, spiteful person she must be. Her daughter is only a few months younger than her holiday boyfriend (indeed, the girl has now turned 18 herself). Yet without a shred of empathy, this woman threw the poor lad to the wolves. Would she have done that to her own son?
And anyway, why? What possible good could it achieve? In what way could it “protect” her daughter?
As you read this, Marcus is languishing, terrified, in Dubai’s notorious al-Awir jail, also known as Dubai Central prison for men. It is a high-security facility housing death row inmates and some of Dubai’s worst criminals, including terrorists, murderers and rapists.
What a place to knowingly help consign an 18-year-old London lad – fresh out of school and training as an apprentice builder. What a terrible, terrible thing to have on your conscience. Although one thing’s for certain.
Even if this strange woman is now suffering pangs of regret for what she’s done (which I rather doubt) that suffering will be as nothing to the agony of the REAL victim in all of this. As our foreign secretary (and coincidentally, Marcus’s MP) David Lammy attempts to delicately resolve this dreadful mess, say a prayer for Marcus.
That poor boy. That poor, poor boy.
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If you discovered that doing something you really didn’t have to do tripled your risk of developing dementia, you’d stop doing it, wouldn’t you? So why do we STILL allow heading of the ball in football? It’s an established fact that headers dramatically raise the chance of players developing conditions such as Alzheimer’s when they reach their 60s and 70s (if not before).
Yes, heading in junior football is now more or less banned, and professional players have reduced the number of practice headers they take in training.
Optimists say modern footballs are lighter than the heavy, often rain-soaked balls of the past, but that ignores the fact that today’s footballs therefore travel much faster and can still deliver a serious punch of kinetic energy on contact with the skull.
Glasgow University has just compared 12,000 ex-pros with 36,000 members of the public and the findings are stark. It has called for “the reduction, if not removal”, of heading. We all know we’ll ban it outright in the end, don’t we? So why not now?
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I am beyond mystified at the hero-worship being accorded to the “hot assassin”; handsome, Ivy-League educated and well-born Italian-American Luigi Mangione.
The 26-year-old, left, is accused of shooting dead United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the back, in full public view on a New York pavement last week.
OK, so Mangione is good looking. So what? If guilty as charged, he’s a whack-job.
The empty shell cases found at the scene had slogans scratched into them; when arrested his shoulder-bag was stuffed with a rambling anti-insurance manifesto.
And I repeat, Thompson was shot in the back. Some hero.