RIYADH, 18 July 2007 — The father of the Saudi young man who was allegedly beaten to death when members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice stormed his house in late May in the capital on the suspicion of his son selling alcohol has demanded execution of the persons responsible for his death.
“I want execution. And I do not want just one person executed, but the three persons I saw beating up my son in the commission center that day,” Muhammad Al-Huraisi, 73, told Arab News. “This is what I officially signed when members of the General Investigation and Prosecution Authority (GIPA) asked me what I sought when I was held up there.”
The father said that he gave out the descriptions of the three men he said were responsible for the death of his son, 28-year-old Salman Al-Huraisi.
“I am not dropping charges. They can offer any amount of money. I am not giving in,” he added, referring to claims he made earlier, saying members of the commission had offered him money to drop the charges.
Muhammad, who is also referred to as Abu Ali, described his version of what happened on May 23 when commission members raided a home in Riyadh for liquor. “When I tried to stop them, two men shoved me into one of the rooms and locked the door,” said Abu Ali.
He said that he knew his son, who was a security guard at a luxury hotel in Riyadh earning SR1,500 a month, was drinking alcohol, but that he was unaware that his son was selling the contraband to make extra money.
The father described how the commission members swooped into his house commando style. “Two separate teams had arrived,” he said. “They entered the house from the roof after they jumped from the two adjacent buildings.”
“’Allahu Akbar… We have overcome the deviants!’ was what they yelled out when they got into the house,” he added.
He said that he had replaced five of the doors the commission members broke down to enter the rooms in the house.
Abu Ali said that had authorities simply showed up with a warrant for the arrest of his son, he would have turned him over immediately and peacefully. “Instead, they raided the place, never showed a piece of paper,” he said, adding that the commission members also destroyed the bottles inside the house instead of collecting them as evidence.
A brother of the deceased said he knew that Salman was dealing in liquor.
“Salman kept telling me that he was fed up of being poor and wanted to get more money,” he said. “He would constantly complain about the SR1,500 he got from working as a security guard.”
The father said that the case had yet to be handed to a Shariah court and that the GIPA (the Saudi equivalent of an attorney general’s office) had yet to provide the family with an autopsy report.
The Governorate of Riyadh had earlier said that over 18 official commission members had raided Al-Huraisi’s house, which did not include police officers and other members who were not assigned to the duty.
Government officials said that one of the commission members who had not been assigned to the raid was responsible for the man’s death.
