And you thought code wars in Australia were nasty. The chief of the United Arab Emirates rugby league has reportedly been arrested as part of a fiendish rugby union plot to crush the 13-man code game once and for all.

Website rugbyleaguehub.com reported that Sol Mokdad, the president of the UAE rugby league commission, was detained by police on Wednesday night on the orders of the General Authority of Youth Welfare and Sport.

Caught up in a code war: UAE Rugby League.

The arrest appears to have been made after a complaint from UAE Rugby concerning the use of the word 'rugby', while the government now appears to view the UAE Rugby League as an illegal organisation.

Mokdad has been the head of UAE rugby league since 2007 and the popularity of the sport has steadily started to grow in the region. And despite an International Rugby Board directive confirming that rugby league is in fact a different sport to rugby union, the message doesn't appear to have filtered through to parts of the Gulf.