A HOLIDAY in Dubai has turned into a nightmare for a British tourist.

The 25-year-old woman has been charged with illegal “extramarital sex” after going to the police to report that she had been gang-raped.

The woman alleges she was attacked by two British men in a hotel last month.

But police arrested her for breaking Emirati law which forbids sex outside of marriage.

If convicted the woman could be jailed, deported, flogged or even stoned to death.

Detained in Dubai, a campaign group based in the UK, said the woman has been released on bail but her passport has been confiscated leaving her stranded in Dubai.

Meanwhile her alleged attackers have been allowed to fly home to the UK.

media_camera Sex outside of marriage is illegal in the United Arab Emirates.

The group’s director Radha Stirling said the case was a “tremendously disturbing” example of long-running abuses in the popular tourist hub.

“Police regularly fail to differentiate between consensual intercourse and violent rape,” she told The Independent.

“Victims go to them expecting justice, and end up being prosecuted. They not only invalidate their victimisation, they actually punish them for it.”

The woman’s family claims the men took it in turns raping the woman and even filmed the attack at a hotel.

“They have taken her passport as lawyers thrash it out. She is staying with an English family but she is absolutely terrified,” a family friend told The Sun.

“She went to the police as the victim as one of the worst ordeals imaginable but she is being treated as the criminal.”

The woman was reportedly on a five-day break with a relative and had planned to take a round-the-world trip from there. She had recently left a career in IT consultancy to pursue her dreams of travel.

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Originally published as ‘Gang-rape’ victim faces jail in Dubai