சவுதி அரேபிய முட்டாவா மீது இன்னொரு வழக்கு

சவுதி அரேபிய முட்டாவா மீது இன்னொரு வழக்கு தொடரப்பட்டது.

Saudi mom sues religious police over 'joyride'
ISLAM | Case may threaten powerful virtue commission

July 2, 2007
BY DONNA ABU-NASR
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia -- As the car stopped outside an amusement park here, two bearded men dragged the driver from the wheel and took the three women on a wild ride of more than an hour, bouncing over sidewalks and finally abandoning them on a darkened street.
The women at first thought they had been kidnapped by terrorists. The two men, however, said they were religious police.

It might have gone down as just one more excess of zealousness by the forces charged with upholding Islamic modesty, except that Umm Faisal, the senior of the three women, did something thought unprecedented in Saudi Arabia: She went to court.

Today, four years after the incident, the latest chapter of the legal battle being waged by this 50-year-old mother of five reopens before Riyadh's Grievances Court, which handles damages suits for abuses by government and public figures.

The unusual publicity surrounding Umm Faisal's story comes on top of two cases involving the death in religious police custody of two Saudi men -- one arrested for allegedly consuming alcohol, another for being alone with a woman not of his family.

Taken together, the cases threaten to undermine the authority of the force's employer, the powerful body called the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.


Called 'adulteress'
Since the commission's creation more than six decades ago, no known public legal action has been taken against its members.
Enter Umm Faisal: She says she, her daughter and her maid went to pick up her two teen sons from the amusement park in the family's Chevrolet Caprice.

''I kept asking the men, 'Are you terrorists?' They finally said they were members of the commission,'' she said. ''When I asked what they wanted, they called me names, including adulteress.''

AP