Big Snake in the UAE?

An unusual snake photo was published in the GulfNews, with the following details:

"Ras Al Khaimah: Municipality engineers on a helicopter assignment on Tuesday pictured a snake believed to be one of the longest found in the mountains of Al Rams area.
"The team of engineers were on an assignment for planning and surveying the remote areas when they spotted the snake.
"A team member said they asked the helicopter pilot to fly lower and used a telephoto lens to take the picture. They said the snake was half inside a burrow and what they could see was several metres long.
"The engineers showed the pictures to their colleagues at the reptile section in the municipality, where the officials said had never encountered such a long snake in the UAE or the region."

Now, the photograph (shown) could be better. Only the body is shown, not the head. From the pattern and body size, though, we can see that it is a variant of the longest snake known in the UAE, Psammophis schokari. A similar pattern can be seen here. This species is common throughout North Africa and the Middle East, and is found in several different morphs. It reaches a bit over 5 feet in length. "Several meters" as reported in this news item may be exaggeration, or perhaps a larger-than-recognized individual, but we're not talking about a monster snake here.