Word: commissioners
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Al-Huraisi's visitors were members of Saudi Arabia's religious police, a 10,000-strong force called the Commission for the Protection of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice. Back at the commission's local headquarters, events took a tragic turn: al-Huraisi died in custody, after allegedly being...
Fueled by the al-Huraisi case and other allegations of abuse, an unprecedented backlash is stirring against Saudi Arabia's feared religious police, or mutaween - Saudi slang meaning "pious ones." After years of acting as if it were above the law, the commission, which was established in 1926, now faces...
Meanwhile, another trial is already under way in the city of Tabuk, where the family of a man who died of an apparent heart attack in the commission's custody is likewise demanding a death sentence for four mutaween allegedly involved in his detention. Ahmed al-Bulawi died after being...
Commission officials have declined to comment while these legal cases are pending, but Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud said in a press conference that "initial investigations prove that the commission did not do anything to cause their deaths." Nayef rebuked the commission's critics, claiming they...
When the deaths of al-Huraisi and al-Bulawi hit the newspapers, Saudis were shocked, yet not entirely surprised. The morality police, whom Saudis sometimes derisively refer to as the "Taliban," are notorious for committing excesses in their fervor for enforcing the Kingdom's puritanical Wahhabi brand of Islam. Typically...