Alex Robert - Dubai Rape Trial Continues

Alexandre Robert, 15, a French citizen was raped by three men in Dubai. One of the rapists has AIDS and Hepatitis. So far Alex has not shown signs of either. Two of the men are already on trial, the third, a 17-year-old juvenile will be tried separately.

For a complete account of what happen to Alex click here.

For an account of the start of the trial click here.

Veronique Robert, Alexandre's mother, had to be restrained and thrown out of court. Presiding Judge Fahmi Mounir ordered policewomen to take out the woman who jumped from her seat and walked towards lawyer Rukoz Hobeika and shouted at him. The mother had stormed to the middle of the courtroom and screamed ‘shame on you!’ to Hobeika.

Hobeika said: “This case has been a media war. The Public Prosecution should have conducted more serious investigations especially concerning the kidnap, threat and assault charges.”

The defense lawyers Rukoz Hobeika and Saeed al Ghailani began by casting doubt on both Alex's testimony and his character and accused him of being a sex addict. They also accused the prosecution of fabricating evidence against the two men.

“Where are the stick and the knife with which the victim claims to have been threatened? I.S. and A.R. had an intimate friendship. He had a particular agreement with A.R.

“According to a forensic medical report, A.R.’s symptoms prove that he suffers from a disease (Al Ubna in Arabic) which makes him ask others to have sex with him but not otherwise. He has become an addict to submissive sex.Therefore, he couldn’t have been forced to have sex with the suspects.”

“A.R. told the public prosecutors that he trusted his close friend, I.S., and that’s why they rode his car. The doctor, who examined A.R. less than 24 hours following the incident, reported that the victim’s body had no bruises, though he claimed he was beaten with a stick and assaulted.”

NOTE: In the preceding comments only the initials of the suspects were used: A.K. is the 35-year-old AIDS and Hepatitis suspect. I.M. is the 18-year-old suspect. I.S. is the 17-year-old juvenile. A.R. is Alexandre Robert the victim.

The Public Prosecution charged A.K., his 18-year-old compatriot, I.M., and a 17-year-old teenager (being prosecuted at Juveniles Court) I.S., with deception and kidnapping the 15-year-old student, A.R., and his 16-year-old compatriot, F.K., by offering to drive them home. The three suspects were also charged with having a homosexual affair against A.R.'s will after threatening him with a knife and a stick.

Besides having denied his charge during his first court appearance, A.K. told the presiding judge: "I was drunk at the time of the incident." The other two suspects also denied their charges.

According to Alex's lawyer Hussain Al Jaziri, the 35-year-old A.K. should have been charged with attempted murder.

"The suspect knew he has Aids and Hepatitis which are fatal diseases. When he reportedly had forceful sex with my 15-year-old victim, he was aware that those diseases are sexually transmitted. This is a murder attempt. The suspect continued to have sex with my client against his will though he was aware that he could kill my client [if the diseases got transmitted]"

"For two and a half months the police couldn't control A.K. to get a blood sample, so how would it be possible for A.R. to escape being sexually abused! My client cries day and night. He wishes he dies normally instead of dying of Aids," said Al Jaziri who is also seeking Dh20,500 in temporary compensation.

The trial continues and a verdict is expected December 12.

Véronique Robert has set up a website boycottdubai.com for those who wish to express support for her son.

Internet Love Triangle Turns Deadly

This is one of those stories that you just can't make up. Thomas Montgomery is a 46-year-old married father of two girls (aged 12 and 14). He gets involved with an 18-year-old girl on the Internet named Jessi. Thomas lies to Jessi and says he is an 18-year-old marine named Tommy who is about to go off to Iraq. Thomas also created another alias for himself as Tom Sr so that Jessi could pass messages and packages through him (Tom Sr) to Tommy in Iraq. The two "young people" continue to chat and get to know each other better. Tommy sends her a picture of a young marine, claiming it was him. Jessi sends Tommy a picture of herself as a beautiful young blond. Tommy falls in love with Jessi. Jessi falls in love with Tommy. Tommy proposed marriage and Jessi accepted. He sent her poinsettias, and she sent him G-strings and dog tags engraved with the message TOM & JESSI ALWAYS & FOREVER.

In the meantime Thomas' wife Cindy becomes suspicious of her husband's online activities. She eventually finds some of Jessi's mementos and unravels the truth. Cindy's marriage might not have been the happiest, but contending with the layers of deceit she uncovered — not to mention a teenager's lingerie — was too much:

"What I cannot believe is that you are living out some bizarre fantasy — as father and son," she wrote in a note to her husband. "If you want to separate — We can... but to continue to lie to me & the kids while she is sending 'your son' gifts in the mail is not acceptable."

The couple stayed in the same house, though Montgomery complained to a coworker about being consigned to the basement. As a mother, however, Cindy felt she had to do something for Jessi. She wrote a letter, enclosing a recent photo of her family.

"Let me introduce you to these people," she said, describing her husband, Tom, her daughters, 12 and 14 years old, and herself. " There was no son, she told Jessi, only her husband, a 46-year-old former marine. "From what I am pulling from your letters you are much closer to [my daughter's] age than mine let alone Tom's," Cindy wrote. "Are you over the age of 18? In this alone, he can be prosecuted as a child predator." Adding that Jessi could be her own daughter, Cindy offered some maternal advice: "Do not trust words on a computer."

For most people that would have been the end of the story.........But in this case the story has just begun!!

Jessi didn't know who to believe. Was there no Tommy? Or had Cindy invented the story because she wanted Tommy for herself? Jessi found a friend Montgomery had mentioned, Brian Barrett, a 22-year-old student at Buffalo State College who worked part-time with Montgomery and played poker with him. When Barrett confirmed his friend's trickery, Jessi was devastated. How could her "everything," as she referred to Tommy, be a nothing? She turned to Barrett for solace.

Their conversations quickly turned intimate. Soon, in public forums online, she and Barrett called Montgomery a child predator and taunted him. Montgomery was furious. "Half the company" thought he was a "fucking loser and predator," he IM'd Jessi. Parents no longer trusted him with their kids. His life was so destroyed that he appeared to be contemplating suicide. "U can say goodbye forever to me and Tommy," he told Jessi.

Despite her own anger, Jessi couldn't turn her back completely on Montgomery. He was all that remained of her lost Tommy, after all. Jessi promised Montgomery she would stop talking to Barrett, saying she took up with him mainly to get revenge. As it turns out Jessi lied. She continued to talk to Barrett. She seemed torn between the two men. Eventually, Montgomery found out that Jessi and Barrett were talking again. He was furious.

Later that evening, September 13, 2006 at 10:16 pm, Barrett punched out of work and walked to his white pickup truck in the parking lot. He swung open the door of his truck, settling into his seat. Three shots pierced the driver's side window, and Barrett slumped sideways. He'd been shot in the neck and upper arm by what police believe was a .30-caliber carbine rifle.

When detectives later examined Barrett's cell phone, they found Jessi's number. Lieutenant Ron Kenyon called her in the middle of the night to confirm that she'd had an online relationship with Montgomery and to warn her that she might be in danger. He then sent a message to her local police department in West Virginia, requesting that a cop go to Jessi's home at the address she'd given him.

Officer J. L. Kirk arrived the next morning at a dingy white house next to an automotive-parts dealer. But Jessi wasn't there. Her mother, Mary, said that the teenager was away and that she had no way to contact her. Kirk reported back to Kenyon, who insisted that he'd just spoken to Jessi a few hours earlier and that she had to be in the house. Kirk continued questioning Mary, whose manner struck him as strange. The more he pressed, the more nervous she got until she finally "came clean," as Kirk put it.

She was the woman Kenyon had spoken to. In fact, she was the woman Barrett had fallen so hard for. And yes, Mary was the woman Montgomery may have killed for. She'd used her daughter's identity to beguile the two men.

Back in Buffalo, Kenyon couldn't believe that the Jessi he'd talked to was really her mother. "She was very convincing," he said. "She sounded like an 18-year-old girl to me." He drove to West Virginia to see the truth himself — that the lithe 18-year-old blond of Barrett's and Montgomery's fantasies was a plump 45-year-old married mother of two with short brown hair.

When questioned, Mary said she joined Pogo a few years ago to relax and kill some time. It was only after she paid for the membership, however, that she realized she'd used Jessi's screen name. Mary was directed to a teen room, and she never bothered to correct the mistake. She didn't intend for her many admirers to fall in love with her. Nor did she fall in love with any of them; she says she is happily married to her husband of 23 years. Brian was a "sweetheart" and when he initiated the flirtation, she didn't know how to discourage it without revealing her true identity. Tommy, she said, "was a child who needed someone to show him they cared."

On November 27, 2006, police arrested Thomas Montgomery on murder charges.

At the trial Prosecutor Frank Sedita argued for the maximum sentence of 25 years, describing Montgomery's "almost predatory" pursuit of the woman and his resentment of Barrett when she cooled to Montgomery's advances after 1 1/2 years and thousands of pages of Internet chats.

"My wife and I don't understand how this could happen, how such evil could walk the Earth," Barrett's father, Daniel, said at the sentencing hearing. "To gun down a boy over simple jealousy does not make sense to us."

Montgomery's lawyer said fantasy and reality blurred for the then-married father of two teenage daughters, who was involved in his church and was president of his daughters' swim club. Montgomery, now divorced, attempted suicide in his jail cell after his arrest. He chose not to speak at his sentencing.

"Until September 2006, this was a man who held his head high," attorney John Nuchereno said. "By September 2006 — call it an obsession, call it an addiction, call it what you want — he was suffering from a diminished capacity of some sort."

48-year-old Thomas Montgomery, entangled in an Internet love triangle built largely on lies, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for killing his rival for the affection of a woman he had never met.

2-Year-Old Girl's Body Found

In the short 2 years that Riley Ann Sawyers spent on earth, she experienced horrible physical abuse at the hands of her mother, Kimberly Dawn Trenor, and stepfather, Royce Zeigler. Before dying, 2-year-old Riley Ann Sawyers was beaten with belts, picked up by her hair, thrown across the room and held under water, according to an affidavit from the Galveston County Sheriff's Office.

After the little girl died the couple covered her in a purple towel then they went to the local Wal-Mart and purchased a "blue colored Sterilite plastic container with hinges and wheels on one end". They placed the body of the girl in the container and hid the container in a storage shed for about 1 to 2 months. Eventually they removed the container from storage, took it to the Galveston Causeway and threw it into the waterway, watching it float away.

After the death of her daughter, Kimberly Tenor would tell people that Riley had been taken away from her by the Ohio Department of Children's Services and even produced a fake letter to back up her claim. The body of the then-unidentified toddler was found on October 29. A fisherman found Riley's body stuffed inside a blue storage container that washed up on an uninhabited island in Galveston's West Bay. A medical examiner said the child's skull was fractured, and a forensic dentist estimated her age at 2 to 3 years. Police dubbed the child "Baby Grace." A police artist's sketch of her was widely circulated in the news media and prompted a call to Galveston police from Riley's grandmother in Ohio, who had not seen the girl in months. On Saturday, police arrested Trenor and Zeigler on charges of injuring a child and tampering with physical evidence, the sheriff's department said. Their bonds were set at $350,000 each.

When police interviewed Trenor on November 23, she "gave a voluntary statement on video with her attorney present in which she describes her involvement, with Royce Zeigler, in the physical abuse, death and disposal of the remains of her daughter, Riley Ann Sawyers."

Riley Ann Sawyers' real father, Robert Sawyers, and her grandmother, Sheryl Sawyers, gave an interview describing what the little girl was like. See the interview here.

Laura DePledge, the family's lawyer, said the family whose grief is described as "simply overwhelming," wants Riley's body returned to Ohio for a memorial service. "What Riley needs is to be brought home," she said. "I think this family needs some closure."

Maj. Ray Tuttoilmondo, of the Galveston County Sheriff's Department asked anyone who knew the child or her family to help detectives reconstruct the events of Riley's short life.

The toddler's case has touched even hardened police officers, he said. "Any way you look at it, we carry a piece of her with us, and we'll always carry a little piece of her with us," he said. He held up a small, pink-and-white shoe identical to those the child was wearing when she was found. "That says it all. A little-bitty shoe."

Monkey Meat - A Religious Rite?

Mamie Manneh, 39, is in a lot of trouble. The Liberian-born New York City resident is in federal court fighting charges that accuse her of the illegal importation of bushmeat from Africa. The case dates to early 2006, when federal inspectors at JFK Airport examined a shipment of 12 cardboard boxes from Guinea. They were addressed to Manneh and, according to a flight manifest, contained African dresses and smoked fish with a value of $780. While inspecting the shipment the inspectors came upon some interesting items which had not been declared.

Stashed underneath the smoked fish, the inspectors found what West Africans refer to as bushmeat: "skulls, limbs and torsos of non-human primate species" including green monkeys and hamadryas baboons, plus the hoof and leg of a small antelope, according to court papers. The meat had been smoked.

Shortly afterwards Mamie received a visit from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agents. They showed up at her house and she explained to them that she ran a smoked fish importing business. She denied knowing anything about bushmeat from Africa and said she had not eaten any since being in the United States. But after she consented to a search, the agents came across a tiny, hairy arm hidden in her garage. "Monkey," she explained, claiming the arm was sent to her out of the blue "as a gift from God in heaven."

Federal prosecutors hit Manneh with smuggling charges that accused her of violating import procedures. Although the importation of bushmeat is not specifically banned, Manneh is accused of falsely labeling her delivery and failing to obtain proper permits, charges that could bring a maximum prison sentence of five years. They suggested she was a menace to man and beast alike. The complaint cited evidence that the illegal importation of bushmeat encourages the slaughter of protected wild animals.

More ominously, the complaint warned of "the potential health risks to humans linking bushmeat to diseases like Lassa fever, Ebola, HIV, SARS and monkeypox."

The case has attracted attention from an array of interested parties. Wildlife conservationists see trade in bushmeat as a grave threat to dwindling species; epidemiologists view it as a dangerous vector of disease. Many African immigrants, who eat bushmeat cubed and cooked in a stew of onions, garlic, tomatoes and chili pepper, see it as a referendum on a cultural practice.

The case took on a new dimension in February, when Ms. Manneh’s lawyer, Jan Rostal of Federal Defenders of New York, filed a motion to dismiss the indictment, arguing that the meat provides “spiritual sustenance” similar to the bitter herbs served at a Passover Seder.

“Unfortunately for the government,” she wrote, the bushmeat case “represents the sort of clash of cultural and religious values inherent in the ‘melting pot’ that is America.”

Manneh testified last year that before arriving in the United States more than 25 years ago, monkey meat was critical to her religious upbringing. At age 7, "I was baptized and they used that for the baptizing ceremony," she told a judge. Baptisms, Easter, Christmas, weddings—all are occasions for eating monkey, Manneh's supporters said in a sworn statement filed with the court.Manneh has managed to recruit some notable allies. Milbank, Tweed, Hadley and McCloy picked up the case in April, offering two lawyers to assist Ms. Rostal, who works out of the public federal defenders office. Manneh's attorneys plan on calling the Harvard professor, Mr. Olupona, to testify to the religious significance of eating bushmeat, according to court papers. Manneh's church also submitted an affidavit explaining:

"This is something our forefathers did, it is something we learned as children, and it is a part of our treasured relationship with God as African Christians."

African expatriates like Edward Lama Wonkeryor, a lecturer at Temple University, have long turned to bushmeat as a home comfort: During his earliest trips from Liberia to this country, in the 1970s, his mother would wrap parcels of bushmeat — monkey, bush hog or lion, smoked so it would keep — and slip them into his suitcase. He would save them for events like weddings and christenings, or when he wanted to feel smarter.

“If I were going to take the Graduate Record Examination or the Law School Admissions Test, definitely I would” eat bushmeat beforehand, said Dr. Wonkeryor, who wrote a letter in Ms. Manneh’s defense. “I am really surprised that they are making a big issue out of this.”

In the meantime Mamie Manneh is sitting in prison over something complete unrelated to this case: For assaulting a woman outside a Staten Island movie theater. Manneh drove her car towards her husband and a woman she suspected was her husband's girlfriend; the husband got out of the way, but Manneh managed to hit the woman.

Happy Thanksgiving!!

After the "turkey dinner" is finished. After the family time. After maybe a few drinks. What do we really know about Thanksgiving? When was the first Thanksgiving? Who started it and why? Why do we eat turkey? If you are not sure of some or all of the answers maybe you should take a look at the history of Thanksgiving or take a Thanksgiving quiz

Happy Thanksgiving Everybody !!