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Freed mum Marnie Pearce tells of nightmare in Dubai prison

'I'm desperate to see my boys again, but my ex-husband won't let me'

Marnie Pearce savoured the air of freedom when she walked out of the Al Awir women s jail in Dubai. Then her elation turned to tears.

“When I took my first step outside prison I looked up at the sky and felt the sun and its warmth on my skin,” she says. “It felt good for a brief moment. “Then, suddenly, it hit me… the children weren t there.”

Six days later, Marnie – the British florist jailed for adultery under Dubai s strict laws – still hasn t seen her two sons, whose locks of hair she had under her pillow in jail when she slept.

Her ex-husband Ihab El Labban, who framed her by making it seem she d had an affair after she caught HIM cheating, was awarded custody of the boys and refuses to let her see them.

She is now penniless and homeless, living out of a suitcase in a hotel in central Dubai, a short drive from where Laith, eight, and Ziad, four, live with their father.

Marnie says: “I am free, yet I can t just get in a car and go see my boys. It s a desperate situation.

“To have them 10 minutes away and not be able to go and touch them is unbearable. Being separated from your children is the worst punishment a mother could ever imagine.

“It s made freedom bittersweet. Not being able to wake up with them makes me feel I am serving a life sentence.”

Marnie was jailed for three months in February, as adultery is deemed a serious criminal offence under Sharia law. A court subsequently ordered her to be deported on her release.

But after a campaign by the Sunday Mirror and human rights charity Amnesty International, she was pardoned over the deportation order.

Marnie can now stay in Dubai to fight for custody of her sons. Her adultery conviction, though, stands.

In a heartbreaking first interview since her release Marnie, 40, says: “I cried so much in prison that I rubbed the skin off my eyelids.”

And she tells how she was kept going by five precious photos of the boys.

“I used toothpaste and stuck them to the bed above me,” she says. “They were the last thing I saw when I went to sleep at night and the first thing I saw when I woke up. I dreamed about them all the time.

“Before I was taken to jail I cut a lock of each of my boys hair and put them in a mirror compact. Each night I kissed it. It helped me get through until the morning.”

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Her only contact with the boys so far has been a two-minute phone call on Tuesday. Ziad excitedly told her he had drawn a picture of him, Laith and Marnie.

Laith asked: “Mummy where are you? We miss you.”

Marnie says: “The boys told me they loved me so, so much. I said I loved them too. “I asked for their father. I begged him to let me see the children. He said we would have to talk about it. Then the line went dead.”

Marnie last saw her sons on February 19, the day she was jailed and had to hand the children to Egyptian-born El Labban, 41, on the steps of Dubai Central Court.

Marnie, of Bracknell, Berks, says: “Laith started to cry as we approached the court. He said, Is this it? and I said, Yes . The children were clinging to me. We had a final hug. I told them to be brave little soldiers.

“Then Ihab came to the car, with a sickly smile on his face. I said to him, You could stop this now, please – all you have to do is walk into the court and drop your case . Laith was crying, Stop it, Daddy .”

But El Labban dragged the screaming boys away. Marnie says: “I staggered to the court and the officers looked at me and started laughing. I was crying, Why are you laughing, I ve just lost my babies. I wanted to die.”

Prison officers then arrived on a bus to take Marnie to Al Awir jail, hidden away in the desert. “When they took me into the prison I was in a daze,” says Marnie.

“I thought, What am I doing here? It looked like a hospital – clean, white, new, bright, bare. But then I looked up. There were people in pink suits staring down at me through bars. I felt liked a caged animal inside a zoo.”

She underwent a humiliating strip-search and was handed one pair of matching pink cotton drawstring trousers and shirt, which she washed every night. Then a guard barked: “Upstairs! Now!”

From that point on Marnie was simply known by the name “British” – she was the only person from UK in the jail.

Marnie made her way up to the first-floor landing, then collapsed. Several prisoners carried her to the 10ft by 6ft cell and lowered her on to a bunk. She didn t move for two days.

Eventually, on her third day, Marnie summoned the strength to get up, to try to phone her sons.

She says: “I called and they were with their father in a shop. I was trying not to cry down the phone and stay strong. But I just went back to my bed in tears.”

Days inside the jail always followed the same routine.

An airport-style tannoy awoke prisoners at 6am with the screeching message: “Get dressed. Breakfast. Come down.” Prisoners were allowed outside into the prison grounds only at night.

During the day Marnie scrubbed jail floors, sweat dripping from her head. She existed on pot noodles which cost 50p in the tuck shop – and lost a stone in weight. She kept a daily journal and a diary, which she hid in a locker in the cell. She also kept a small bag of make-up and a bottle of Burberry perfume. Along with a pad of paper and some pens, they were the only possessions she was allowed.

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She used 14 pens in her first three weeks, writing until her hands hurt. “I wanted to write everything down so that when my sons grow up they can find answers to every question they have about what their father did to me,” she says.

At night, she lay awake listening to the anguished screaming and crying from other women. Only the anticipation of speaking to her children kept her going.

She often queued for more than three hours for her turn at the phone, even though there was never any guarantee El Labban would let her talk to the boys. She says: “He would either not answer or laugh and say call back. It was torture.”

El Labban, who Marnie wed in the Seychelles in 1999 before moving to Dubai, claimed to police she was having an affair with Briton Brian Clark, the husband of one of her friends.

Officers raided Marnie s home last March and arrested her, even though she was doing nothing more than sharing a cup of tea with Brian, who had popped in to use her computer.

El Labban later produced used condoms which he claimed were evidence of an affair – even though it was him who had been cheating on Marnie, with American mum-of-two Tonya Thompson, who he met at a conference in Dubai.

Marnie threw him out over the affair and in revenge, he concocted his story about her and Brian, which she vehemently denies.

Marnie recalls how the worst moment in jail came two weeks ago on Laith s eighth birthday. She awoke at 6am, feeling both excitement and fear. “I could see the three phone boxes from my bed,” says Marnie. “I was anxious, in case there was a long queue. So I kept my eyes fixed on them.”

Then at 7.30am she made the call. But when her elderly former mother-in-law answered, she laughed at Marnie and hung up.

She tried 48 times that day. But she never got to speak to Laith. And at one point, she endured 19 consecutive days without speaking to the boys.

But as the clock began to tick down on her sentence, Marnie realised it wasn t being inside that really terrified her – it was being taken out and sent home.

“Being deported meant not seeing the boys until they were 18,” she says. “I knew by staying in jail they would at least be on the same land as me. I started to pray not to be deported.”

Then, just days before she was due to be flown out of Dubai, those prayers were answered when the prison tannoy bellowed: “British, come down.”

Marnie recalls: “I went to the office and an officer said, You are to go outside. They stop deportation. ”

After an agonising three-day wait, she was finally set free.

She says: “I refused to believe it until they gave me a document saying my deportation had been lifted.

“It was only when it was in my hand I truly believed it to be true.

“I saw a friend coming through the door and then I knew I was actually going out.” For the first time in 69 days, she saw the sun.

Her first act as a free woman was to put a cherished silver-heart bracelet – taken from her by guards – back on her wrist.

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Engraved on one side of the heart is Laith s name, the other Ziad s.

Sitting in her hotel room, paid for by friends and well-wishers, Marnie says: “I didn t miss any material objects

in jail – I only missed my children. Ihab should hang his head in shame for what he has done. I hate him more than words can say.”

And clutching pictures of the boys, she sobs: “I only want to help bring them up and be their mum. I don t want them to ever forget me.

“Right now I can t look any further than day to day. I have nowhere to sleep, no home, no money, no job.

“Everything I had has gone. But at least I still have hope.”