I worked in Dubai for the winter of "98~ summer of "99, and stayed in an apartment block on AlRicca street on the Bur Dubai side of the city. coming back from a night out, I followed my flatmate into the apartment, to witness in our bathroom, the largest eight legged thing i have ever seen in my life. after blind screming and panic, we ran down to the hotel reception and performed a hilarious game of charades trying to demonstrate to the arabic staff what we had in our room. They duly went to investigate, joined us in the whole running and screaming thing, and then promnptly called the police, who entered the room en masse, guns at the ready (literally). After half an hour, we were allowed back up, being told that the problem had been dealt with, though their English (and indeed our arabic) did not stretch to finding out how. We were then informed by the English speaking army officers we spoke to the next day, that what we had found was a camel spider. In basic description, it was HUGE, it"s legs were approx. 7 inches long, and it"s abdomen the size of a tea cup. It had massive pincers on the front, and was dark brown and black flecks. It was not moving at us when we saw it, but it was moving up and down as if it was doing press ups, so i cannot comment on it"s speed or agressive tendancies. we have searched extensively on all the web sites we could find, and viwed various galleries of pictures, however nothing we found in an appropriate size or description came close. Pictures we found of solifudes were not at all similar, and anything we found that fitted the description is apparently much too small in real life. i have also heard first hand an account from a U.K. Squaddie, who described perfectly the same animal i just have, and it had basically taken a chomp out of his leg before he realised it was there. just for your information, our apartment block was literally built on the edge of the desert, and the air conditioning ducts faced straight out onto the sand! Hope this has been of interest to you...