How to know it is this one
About 12 to 15mm long, light tan to brown, with two dark parallel stripes running down the shield behind the head. Those stripes are the giveaway — no other cockroach common in UAE homes has them. Nymphs are much smaller and almost black, but they carry the same stripes.
If what you are seeing is large, glossy and reddish-brown at 30 to 40mm, that is an American cockroach — a different problem, usually arriving from drains rather than living in the kitchen.
Where it hides
Never in the open. German cockroaches live pressed into narrow gaps close to food, warmth and water: behind and under the fridge, inside the motor housing, in the gap between a cabinet and the wall, under the sink around the waste trap, inside the dishwasher door cavity, and behind loose tiling. In apartment blocks they also travel between flats through plumbing voids and service risers.
The signs before you see one
- Small dark specks like ground pepper in drawer corners and along cabinet edges — droppings
- A musty, slightly oily smell that gets stronger as numbers grow
- Shed skins, translucent and papery, in the same corners
- Egg cases: small brown capsules about 8mm, often stuck in a crevice
Why the spray did not work
A German cockroach population lives inside cavities. Surface spraying kills the few insects out in the open and leaves the harbourage untouched, so numbers rebuild within weeks. Worse, some sprays cause the population to scatter and establish new harbourage elsewhere — which is how a problem confined to one kitchen cabinet becomes a problem across a whole apartment.
What works is gel bait placed inside the cavities themselves. The insects feed and carry it back, so it reaches the nymphs you never see. Then the thing sustaining them — a leaking trap, a gap around a waste pipe — has to be dealt with, or any treatment is temporary.