A 17-year-old Emirati girl who was taken off her father by her mother and grandmother just after birth following the couple’s divorce met him for the first time in a dramatic movie-style encounter at a Dubai court.

The girl had not stopped thinking of her father all those years before she was asked to get dad’s identification when she joined the secondary school class.

When she went to the family affairs section at Dubai’s courts with her grandmother for that purpose, she met the section’s director Abdul Salam Darwish, who realized that the girl had never seen her father. He then decided to arrange that meeting without her grandmother’s knowledge.

Darwish contacted the father and asked him to come to the section, where the man told him about his divorce and how he had been deprived of his daughter.

“He sounded a respectable and quiet man…the father felt there is something when I asked him some questions,” Darwish told Albayan daily.

“I then called his daughter in and told her I would like to introduce her to her father…I could see tears in his eyes when she told me how he abandoned her…….but I told her that she should not be cruel to him and that she could forgive him when she hears his version of the story.”

He said the two then met at his office and hugged each other, adding that she learned that her dad was still her supporter as he was giving monthly alimony to her mother and was also depositing money in the bank for her.

“She was told that he was paying her school fees and all other expenses…she was told that he had set up a bank account in her name and that it now has more than Dh90,000 in it…she was told that he had never forgotten her and that he is not the sort of the man she was told about…only then, she knew that she had not been told the truth all those years and with tears in her eyes, she kissed his head and decided to meet again and again.”