New York college student released from Dubai after being sentenced to year for touching guard’s arm

A New York college student was released from Dubai after she was sentenced to a year in prison for allegedly touching a security guard’s arm at the airport.

Elizabeth Polanco De Los Santos, a 21-year-old student at the Bronx-based Lehman College, had her sentence commuted and "is ecstatic to be returning to the US after five months of anguish," the United Arab Emirates advocacy group Detained in Dubai said Tuesday.

"Elizabeth boarded her flight home to New York late Tuesday night. The news that her sentence would be commuted was a welcome end to Elizabeth’s hellish 5 months in Dubai that left her humiliated, traumatised and out of pocket US$50,000," Detained in Dubai CEO Radha Stirling, who represented the student, said. 

Los Santos was detained in July during a layover from Turkey, where she went on vacation with a friend after her father died and she had back surgery. When airport security checked Los Santos, they asked her to remove a waist compressor that her doctor had ordered her to wear because of the surgery.

She was unable to put the medical device back on alone and the female security guards would not assist her. Los Santos tried to get the attention of her friend who was on the other side of a curtain but one of the guards was standing in her way. 

"I gently touched her arm to guide her out of the way then desperately started crying to my friend for help," Los Santos said. She was then detained for several hours and forced to sign paperwork in Arabic before she could leave the airport. Only later did she discover that a travel ban was in place against her and she had a grueling legal process ahead.

Los Santos had originally been fined $2,700, which she paid, but the airport employees appealed the sentence, asking for her to be jailed. Stirling said the security guards were "largely driven by the likelihood that they will be offered compensation to drop the case" and that the Dubai government "should forbid workers from accepting compensatory payments as it only encourages workers to make false allegations."

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