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Saudi religious police suspect elderly woman of sexual liaison
 RIYADH - A 70-year-old Saudi woman was briefly jailed after being detained by the religious police who suspected her motives for entering a shop owned by a man in a busy Riyadh market, a paper said on Saturday.
Members of the dreaded Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, known as Mutawas, descended on the shop in the capitals Al Deira market on Tuesday after the woman entered the shop while there was no one inside except the male owner, the Saudi-owned Al-Hayat daily reported. The commission suspected the woman was in unlawful seclusion with the owner despite the fact that the shops shutters were wide open, the paper said, employing a term commonly used in Saudi Arabias puritanical society to describe a sexual liaison.
| "Dang it Granny, the windows are wide open! Don't! Stop! Don't! Stop! Don't Stop! Don't Stop ... |
Quoting her nephew, the paper said the woman, who could barely walk, had gone missing after she went shopping.
"Uncle Ackmed, have you seen Grandma?"
"No, Mahmoud, not since she left the house for some sort of meeting."
"She ... left ... the house! Alone? Oh, Uncle, why did you let her go!?"
"She seemed rather pleased with herself." |
Her family searched for her in hospitals and police stations all over the capital until they found her in a womans prison late Tuesday. She was later released.
| "And I hope you're happy with yourself, Grandma!" |
Mutawas, who are attached to the countrys powerful religious establishment, are charged with enforcing the ultra-conservative kingdoms strict Islamic moral code including the segregation of the sexes in public. The interior ministry issued a decree on May 25 aimed at reining in the Mutawas by requiring them not to interrogate detained suspects, as they previously did, but to hand them over to police.
Posted by: Steve White 2006-06-11 |
