Australian accountant Marcus Lee reveals what life in Dubai’s toughest prisons is like

VIOLENCE, murder, filth and sickness: An Australian tells of life inside Dubai’s toughest prison.

“I’LL write one day about all the different things I’ve seen, had to endure, had to fight against or fend off.”

This is what Australian accountant Marcus Lee wrote to his wife Julie in 2009, almost five months in to his time at Central Prison at Al Aweer in Dubai where he was wrongfully detained on false charges of bribery.

Five years on, returning to his Gold Coast home after proving his innocence, Mr Lee has shared his shocking story in his book Trapped. It’s easy to see why it was a tough one to tell.

Spending nine months between three prisons, Mr Lee endured threats of violence, and witnessed bodies of those who didn’t survive dragged from crowded cells in front of him. His jail was covered in the filth that compounds when 200 people are forced to share two toilets — when they’re allowed to visit them.

Julie Lee and Marcus Lee at the Gold Coast Casino show in 1988, not long after moving to Queensland

His “prison hell” began in solitary confinement where he spent two months in a “concrete box”.

After being interrogated for 12 hours about an accusation he didn’t completely understand, Lee was dragged into the 1.5m x 2.5m room with no windows, one steel door and a mattress on the floor.

“I went crazy in there,” he tells news.com.au.

“You sit there and your mind does backflips. There’s no fresh air, no natural light. You get taken to the bathroom only when you beg enough.”

Lee craved human contact while he was in solitary confinement, but when he got it after being transferred to the Port Rashid holding cells, things were even worse.

The cells were designed to house accused crims before they faced court. But they had grown to hold people for up to three years and when Mr Lee was there were at triple capacity.

A plan of Central Al Aweer prison Marcus drew and sent to his wife Julie.

“Port is a humanitarian disgrace,” he said.

“It’s not sanitary, there’s two working toilets for 200 people, so people go anywhere.”

The filth made him sick, or it could have been the food.

“The food was rancid. Being so stressed made it hard to eat, but when I did, the food frequently made me sick. There were cockroaches everywhere.”

Marcus thought he was in hell, but his experience in the third prison he was transferred to, Dubai’s main jail Central Al Aweer was “unbelievable”.

“The violence was unlike anything I could have imagined,” he says.

“Fortunately I was able to avoid most of it myself, but the things I witnessed were just horrific.”

A poem that Julie Lee snuck to Marcus Lee while Marcus was being held in solitary confinement

Fight and riots were a daily occurrence, Lee became numb to seeing people killed in front of him and casually dragged away. In his book, he describes one of the most shocking things he saw.

“Once a fight broke out between some of the Indian ‘serial killers’ who had been with us in Port Rashid.,” he wrote.

“In moments it dissolved into a deadly melee and suddenly there was a sickening thuck sound. One of the brawlers had hit the ground, smashing onto the concrete headfirst and as he did, I felt liquid spray over my face and the front of my body.

“I said (his cellmate) Matt, ‘I’ve got blood on me, I can feel it!’

“He looked at me and said, ‘No, there’s no blood.’

“I kept saying, ‘I can feel it, I can feel the wetness.’ He was right, it wasn’t blood. It was brain fluid. Someone else’s brain fluid, all over me. How was anyone supposed to stay sane in here?”

Mr Lee managed to stay sane, with the help of his wife Julie who visited as frequently as she could, until his release in October 2009 when bail was granted and he went into house arrest as his case meandered through the courts until December last year.

Marcus Lee (right) leaving prison after nine months in three different, equally horrific jails.

It ended five years of trauma for the couple who had moved to Dubai in 2006 when Marcus took a job with property developer Nakheel at the height of the emirate’s property boom.

In 2009 he and his boss Matthew Joyce were arrested and jailed on charges of bribery brought forward by another Australian developer, Sunland, which claimed they were duped into paying a $14 million commission to another Australian company, Prudentia.

After courts found Sunland had knowingly paid the money and their claims could no longer be substantiated, the two were finally acquitted of fraud charges in December 2009.

In January 2014 he and Julie returned to the Gold Coast where they are trying to live a normal life.

“There was a one per cent chance that we would get through, and I thought that every day,” he said.

“I’ve been through some horrific stuff, a lot of which I would rather forget, but telling the story was one of the hardest things I’ve been through.”

Marcus and Julie Lee at their Burleigh Waters home with dog Dudley and their new book Trapped. Pic: Glenn Hampson