The photo has been used for illustrative purposes.

Hamza M Sengendo, Staff Reporter

An airport porter opened a passenger’s bag and snatched foreign banknotes worth one and a half dirhams. He has been slapped with a Dhs5,000 fine plus deportation.

The 21-year-old Asian porter was working at the airport in Dubai under a security services provider. He was on duty handling luggage on a conveyor belt when he snatched 300 Sudanese pounds.  

He was nabbed trying to smuggle the sum out of the airport’s exit inspection point around 4.30am on Aug.25 last year, according to airport police records. The Sudanese pounds were worth Dhs1.5 only.

The Dubai Criminal Court sentenced him to three months in prison to be followed by deportation and ordered him to pay a Dhs5,000 fine.

The Appeals Court has upheld the penalty though it suspended the prison term.

In police records, when the defendant’s shift ended, he went to the employees’ inspection area and walked through the body scanner. The sum was detected. On being confronted he failed to prove the sum belonged to him.

Cops referred him to the CID office at the airport. He confessed and revealed he was loading bags into a container when he opened one, removed the sum and stashed it in his trousers’ pocket with an aim to smuggle it after his shift.

During prosecution questioning, he reportedly narrated that an inspector at the body scanner allocated for the airport’s employees frisked him and seized him with SDG300. He claimed the sum fell from a bag onto the belt.

He acknowledged he flouted workplace laws stipulating that any lost and found items should be handled over to the supervisor. “I spotted part of the money in the bag and another on the belt. I snatched both sums instead.”    

Prosecution records showed a foreign exchange company did not exchange the 15 bills of SDG20 denominations as they did not have a market value. Prosecutors had demanded the jury to hand him a tough penalty.