You'd have thought that, coming back to Lalaland from Europe, you'd have the right to expect the usual slew of daft 'good times' news from the dailies but I was shocked to catch Gulf News' story on Alla Khrapovitskaya, the 20 year old student who was attacked in Dhiyafa, near to where our bijou offices are.
Returning home from university one evening late in May, she was slashed repeatedly in the face by an unknown attacker using 'a large knife'. She remembers little about the incident, says GN, bar that it was unprovoked and her assailant took nothing from her and didn't try to touch her sexually.
The slash across her face cuts through her left cheek and then, the other side of her mouth, her right cheek. Another cuts down across her mouth from her left cheek while the right side of her face bears a downward slash from her eyebrow to her lower cheek. In all, she has seven such slashes carved into her face. The scarring she has been left with is horrific.
Her mother wants her to have reconstructive surgery: she told GN she was willing to sell her kidney to pay to restore her daughter's face. I did find it strange that someone would immediately think of that as a way to raise money.
But two things really struck me hard about this story. The first was that I cannot recall any previous story - did it really take a month to get this out there? And the second thing was that the GN report doesn't address the one angle that is surely of the greatest public concern. Despite a natural sympathy for the poor girl, it's the fact that the police are at a total loss: the attacker left 'no clues' apparently.
Which means that whoever did this is still free and wandering around Dubai's lively Satwa residential area at night. The thought is unsettling, to say the least.
6 comments:
and people still claim that Dubai is safe !!!
Dubai must still rank as being far safer than pretty much any other major city in the world.
What worries me a little is that for the past month one area of it has been arguably a little less safe and nobody has known about the potential problem.
Presumably because we don't want to talk about problems...
So we've got a potential killer - a madman slashing pretty girls who are wandering around one of the most visited districts in the city and it takes a month for any media to even raise a comment on the story?
That's fucking madness. Really. How many other women have been attacked that we haven't been told about?
A month to break a 'Killer on the loose' story?
Not even London or New York. Only Dubai could suppress that one. Or have a media that would fawn to authority enough to let it be supprwsed. This sucks.
http://www.7days.ae/showstory.php?id=52983
Check this out...A friend of mine was subjected to a similar thing. Newspaper said it was a theft attempt. I spoke to her yesterday. She told me that she never said that. It was not. She lay sprawled on the floor and the guy had every chance of grabbing her bag and running as it fell loose, instead of trying to stab her a second time!
I saw that story. It seemed very different, though. Different area, a scalpel and not 'a big knife', very public attack...
Nobody's asking the question you did, though.
It's frustrating, isn't it? You've got no confidence in investigative journalism and so the rumour mill becomes more pertinent..
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