Man arrested for assaulting woman after breaking into her Miami hotel room

Lebanon native faces charges of burglary with assault and battery

Marwan Habib, 32 (Miami Beach Police)

A man aged 32 has been arrested by police in Miami Beach for an attack on a woman at a hotel.

Marwan Habib, who was apprehended on Thursday, was said to have targeted a woman who was staying at Miami Beach’s Hotel Victor in November.

He confessed to Miami Beach Police Department investigators that he assaulted the woman, who he kissed and touched after showing up at her hotel room without permission.

Mr Habib had met the woman earlier that evening, and was able to convince hotel reception to hand him a key to her room, a police report said.

“Hotel staff advised the victim that the defendant had her information and even had a woman on the phone pretending to be her, so he was given a key thinking it was her granting access,” the report added.

While the woman from Kansas City was unnamed on Friday, the Miami Beach Police Department said it was investigating a number of allegations made against Mr Habib.

As WSVN-TV reported, police said Mr Habib would “pursue females in order to have sex or date them, even after they advised them to stop doing so on multiple occasions.”

His behaviour also led to one woman leaving her apartment in Miami Beach, and a neighbour told the news station that Mr Habib was “very insistent, has been harassing”.

In Lebanon Mr Habib was at the centre of a social media campaign against him in 2019 following revelations of sexual assault made by a number of women from his home country.

The furore around Mr Habib was compared to “Me Too”, and revelations of sexual abuse carried out by male figures.

On Twitter, a woman who was in the Lebanese city of Jbeil at the same time as Mr Habib said she was “followed and cornered in a parking lot in Jbeil by this man in the summer of 2020”.

“I ran away unharmed but the extent of damage this man has caused to at least a hundred women and the fact that Lebanese authorities knew and let him roam free is horrifying,” she wrote of his arrest.

A lawsuit was filed against Mr Habib in Lebanon but it did not result in charges against him, as L’Orient Today reported on Friday, and in an interview with a Lebanese TV station he claimed innocence.

Miami Beach authorities have ordered Mr Habib to sway from the Hotel Victor South Beach, and WSVN-TV reported that he remains in custody and with no bond because of an immigration hold.

It was not clear if he had a lawyer.