DAMMAM, 29 July 2007 — The Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice announced yesterday that it has recently foiled a young Saudi man’s attempt to blackmail a married woman for sex by threatening to reveal compromising photographs from her life before she was married, the daily Al-Watan reported yesterday.
Omar Al-Dowaish, the commission’s chief in Dammam, said the woman confessed to having “some wrong things” and he claimed that she sought help from the commission to lead a moral and chaste life.
The woman told the commission members that she tried her best to dissuade the man from his evil plans. She even offered to pay him a large sum to forget the past and leave her to live as a good wife. But the man was adamant and threatened to publicize the compromising photos on the Internet unless she obeyed his wishes.
Al-Dowaish said his officials handled the issue with extreme discretion and secrecy. They made inquiries about the youth on the basis of the information supplied by the woman and discovered that he lived in another city outside the Eastern Province. This required them to work in concert with the branch of the commission in that city.
While the commission members were waiting for the next move from the youth, the woman received a call from him. He asked her to meet him at a particular commercial complex in Dammam. He also repeated his threat that if she failed to obey him she alone would be responsible for the consequences.
Then the commission team accompanied her to the place where the man asked her to wait for him and caught him. On interrogation he confessed to all the charges against him.
Al-Dowaish said the commission members also recovered copies of the woman’s photographs and all other things that could be used to blackmail her in future. The man was released after they took an undertaking from him that he would not attempt to blackmail her in the future.
