Prague, Aug 30 (CTK) – Hamid bin Abdal Sani, a member of the Qatari ruling family who was prosecuted for having paid sex with juvenile girls in Prague in the past, has sued the Czech Republic in search for financial compensation for non-material damage and lost income, Czech server iDnes.cz reported yesterday.
Last October, a Czech court sentenced Sani in absentia to 11 months and eight days in prison.
Since his release from Czech custody, Sani has lived in Qatar. He seeks compensation for what he calls his unlawful 4.5-month detention in a Czech custody prison in 2005.
He demands 225,000 crowns for non-material damage caused to him and 22,500 crowns as compensation for his lost income.
“The Czech Supreme Court [previously] found out a serious violation of law to the detriment of the accused,” Sani’s defence lawyer Anna Vetrovska writes in the lawsuit submitted to a district court in Prague.
Czech police arrested Sani in September 2004 and he spent the following 11 months in custody.
He was accused of having asked four young women to take school girls aged around 16 to his flat in Prague. He had sex with one underage girl at least, two juvenile girls and three who were over 18 and thus adult. He knew the girls’ real age. He paid each of them 2,000 crowns for sex.
Former justice minister Pavel Nemec, however, decided on April 6, 2005, that Sani be extradited for criminal prosecution to Qatar, his homeland.
The Prague district court that was in charge of the case refused to release Sani from custody as did the higher-level city court. Nemec therefore turned to the Supreme Court, which decided on August 22, 2005, that Sani’s prosecution in the Czech Republic be discontinued and that he be released from custody.
Now Sani wants compensation for the period between Nemec’s order to release him and his real release based on the Supreme Court’s decision.
The district court originally sentenced Sani to 2.5 years in prison in 2005, but the appeals court cancelled the verdict.
In the meantime, the Czech Republic extradited Sani to Qatar, which released him from prison after two days and later it halted his prosecution arguing that the stay in the Czech prison punished him enough.
Sani was originally accused of having paid sex with 15 girls, but the prosecution of six of the cases was stopped based on the presidential amnesty from 2012.
In another case, the court could not use the girl’s testimony due to procedural reasons.
In the remaining cases, the court found Sani guilty, though the judge admitted that the girls looked older than their age, had experience with sex and earned “quite a decent sum” by sex with Sani.
Finally, the district court sentenced Sani last October to 11 months and eight days in prison for sexual abuse, procuring, threatening of young people’s morals and inciting to sexual intercourse.
The sentence corresponded to the period Sani spent in Czech custody before being extradited to Qatar.
In addition, the court expelled him from the Czech Republic indefinitely.
($1=24.192 crowns)
