The woman who reported her late husband’s ex-wife to police in Dubai after being called a “horse” on Facebook was unrepentant today, declaring that she deserves punishment for the insult.
Samah Al Hammadi, 42, claimed to have suffered a campaign of harassment by Laleh Shahravesh, who was arrested with her 14-year-old daughter Paris when they arrived in the United Arab Emirates for his funeral last month.
Ms Shahravesh, 55, faces two years in jail and a £50,000 fine over the social media posts from 2016 on a wedding photo. In one post, she wrote: “Damn you. You left me for this horse.”
The posts were written after she discovered that Pedro Manuel Coreia Dos Santos had remarried.
Ms Shahravesh, of Richmond, was arrested at Dubai airport under strict cyber crime laws on March 10, a week after her ex-husband’s death from a heart attack, aged 51.
Ms Hammadi, from Tunisia, said today she decided to make the formal complaint after “suffering in silence” for over a year. She claimed Ms Shahravesh had sent numerous disparaging messages and emails about them since the divorce in 2016 — even to Mr Santos’s boss at HSBC.
She told the Standard: “She has been abusing him, sending emails, even to his boss in the bank, saying I am a b****, that I took him from her, that she doesn’t have money. He sent emails asking her to stop. It did not stop.”
Ms Shahravesh had been married to Mr Santos for 18 years and they lived together in Dubai for eight months before she returned to Britain with their daughter.
A few months later, in 2016, she unexpectedly received divorce papers and saw from photos on Facebook that Mr Santos, who was Portuguese, had remarried. In one post, Ms Shahravesh wrote: “I hope you go under the ground you idiot. Damn you. You left me for this horse.” In another comment, which she wrote in Britain, she said: “You married a horse you idiot.”
Mr Santos’s widow said she decided to take action after claiming a relative had received a message from Ms Shahravesh. Ms Hammadi said: “If she is innocent she will go free, but if not she has to pay... She needs to stop.”
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She also defended Dubai’s cyber crime laws, which have been criticised by campaigners as being “unreasonable”. “It is a crime in Dubai. It is right. I don’t feel sorry. She made him [Mr Santos] suffer in the last year of his life. Let the law take part.”
Ms Shahravesh and her daughter were held for 12 hours before being released. Paris has returned to the UK but her mother’s passport has been seized and she must stay in Dubai.
Ms Shahravesh is living in a hotel and faces court proceedings on Thursday. “I have no money left after paying to stay in a hotel here for over a month,” she said. “I have lost my job and am unable to pay for rent on the flat I live in with Paris. Because of this we are about to lose the flat. I am even in debt to my family for over £5,000. My life is in ruins, and that is even before the huge fines and jail I am facing here.”
Ms Shahravesh admitted writing two of the messages in a fit of anger. She said: “I had no idea he was getting married again, and so soon after our own marriage broke down. I reacted badly. I lashed out and wrote two unpleasant comments about his new wife on his Facebook page.” A Foreign Office spokeswoman said they were in contact with the UAE authorities regarding the case.
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