FORMER Scorpions drummer James Kottak wants to release a book he wrote while infamously incarcerated in Dubai during 2014.
Kottak, who was subsequently booted from the German rockers’ line-up, says he wrote 180 pages worth of manuscript while locked up for insulting Islam, raising his middle finger and being intoxicated in transit at Dubai airport.
“Not fun, not good but I did write a book while I was in there,” Kottak told The Metal Voice podcast.
“I wrote 180 pages front and back. I didn’t stop. I think I should try and get that out maybe.
“It’s pretty good, I’ve been told. I sent it to a few people.”
Giving his recollections of the incident, Kottak said: “I hadn’t been drinking at all.
“It was a long-ass flight, I couldn’t sleep, I had a few glasses of wine.
“I get off the plane and my compadre … he’s always telling jokes.
“We’re in this area, there’s probably 100 people there or whatever, and (he) starts cracking jokes.
“I’m going ‘something’s not right here, we should be getting on one of these buses to go’ so I went over the ask the chick.
“She goes ‘oh no, you’re in the wrong terminal’. I go ‘what the eff!’ Like that. I didn’t think too much about it because I don’t usually cuss at all.
“She goes ‘if you don’t run, you’re going to miss your plane’.
“(My friend) and I grab our gear and we’re about to head out the door and here comes police. I guess she didn’t know that term, she thought I was doing it to her.
“They said ‘come over here’. Then we went a few steps further. Then a few more steps further and all of a sudden there’s three or four cops around me. They kept questioning me.
“I was pissed because we were going to miss our flight.
“They took me – in the airport – to this police area. There was one American guy there. It’s not a jail like you see on TV. This place is kinda open and stuff. He goes, ‘dude, you’ll be out of here tomorrow’.
“It didn’t happen like that and nobody would give me any information.
“I hung around and that’s really about it … I ended up being there 33 days.”
Asked if he was inebriated at the time of the incident, Kottak answered: “No. I was probably halfway there.
“What I found out later is that when you’re in the airport, you’re in the neutral zone. They were walking me here and they were walking me there, then they walked me to the doors to go out of the airport then they were able to … lock me up.”
A policeman told the court when Kottak appeared: “The defendant was complaining loudly about a smell which he claimed was coming from a group of Afghans and Pakistanis. When one of the ground staff told me that she heard him cursing Muslims and that he was acting rowdily, I confiscated his passport and told my supervisor.”
