The lucky mispelt adulteress

Sharjah law enforcement: what images of wisdom, competence and efficiency does that stir up in most of our minds? Very few, and even less after reading this gem, when the wrong Indonesian-suspected adulteress was deported, because her name was similar to that of another Indonesian convicted-adulteress:

Sharjah: An Indonesian woman suspected of adultery was deported by a Sharjah prison before she had been sentenced by the court, sources told Gulf News on Saturday.

Sharjah jail officials mistook the woman for another Indonesian woman who had already been jailed and lashed for adultery charges, and was awaiting deportation after serving her term, they said.

The confusion also arose because of the similarity in the women's names: Lilian had yet to be sentenced, while Lileet had completed her term.

Jail officials are blaming the Arabic language, because "n" and "t" are written similary: the n with one dot above, and the "t" with two. Of course if they wrote Arabic properly, the names would be as patently dissimilar as they are in English.

But with so many Arabic speakers too lazy or too clueless to use vowel diacritics in official documents, their writing reads a bt lk ths. Intelligible enough, except when you come to trying to tell the difference between K(i)t and K(a)t.

And of course there's no standardisation of transliteration, coupled with immensely sloppy spelling standards, meaning that Susie Peters may end up back in in English again as Soosee Peteers or Soozey Beetrs. Not a great way to build a database if you ever want to cross-reference with foreign governments and law enforcement agencies: police and census operators, take note.

In another incident in the same jail, officials were about to lash a woman 120 times for adultery, as the woman pleaded for mercy, the sources said.

But they stopped just in the nick of time when they realised they were about to administer the punishment for the second time.

Sharjah officials: words literally fail.