Manama: Qatar police have arrested an Arab beggar who had more than Qatari Riyals 51,000 (Dh51,441) with her. The beggar had been reported by the residents of a neighbourhood in the capital Doha after they noticed she was moving from house to house to ask for money, local Arabic daily Al Watan reported on Monday.
Begging is not allowed in Qatar and the police sent patrols to look for the foreign woman and arrested her. She was eventually apprehended in the neighbourhood and taken to the station where the police discovered that she had QR51,791 and a mobile phone with her. The woman admitted that she used several tricks to receive money from the residents in the neighbourhood. She was later transferred to the competent authorities for the appropriate action, the daily said.
Interior ministry officials urged Qatar residents to cooperate with them to help wipe out the phenomenon of begging by calling a hotline. Begging is not permitted in any of the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member countries, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, where beggars take advantage of the local population’s relatively high standards of living to receive money.
In some cases, the beggars resort to cross-dressing to boost their chances of receiving money from people who tend to sympathise more with women seemingly in need. In October, Security authorities in Saudi Arabia arrested a young man who was disguised as a woman. The police in the city of Kharj, 80 kilometres south of the capital Riyadh, were intrigued by the movements of the beggar at a traffic light and upon verifying “her” papers discovered that he was a young man posing as a woman to win the sympathy of drivers and receive money from them.
In a similar case also in Saudi Arabia, a man begged for five months as a woman before his disguise was uncovered. The man, wearing an abaya — the traditional coverall worn by women in the Gulf — told police that he earned up to 200 riyals (Dh195.82) on a regular day and that his income increased on Fridays as a larger number of devout Muslims head to mosques. In 2012, police in Kuwait City arrested an expatriate who disguised himself as a woman to beg for money. The man who fooled people in the upscale Salmiya neighbourhood in the capital Kuwait City was arrested after a woman who gave him money felt there was something wrong with the begging “woman”. Her husband alerted the police who rushed to the place and arrested the beggar who confessed to receiving up to 25 Kuwaiti Dinars (Dh324.80) a day.
