JEDDAH, 21 July 2007 — Saudi security forces on Thursday detained five women and two men in an incident that officials linked to weapons possession but which an activist said followed a sit-in by the women.
Four of the women were set free after questioning, Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Mansour Al-Turki said yesterday.
Matrook Al-Faleh, a political science professor at King Saud University, told Arab News that Abdullah Al-Hamed was detained along with the five women and his brother, Issa, in the city of Buraidah in the Al-Qassim region, 320 km north of the capital Riyadh. Al-Faleh is the legal representative of Al-Hamed and was jailed with him in 2004. King Abdullah pardoned them in August 2005.
Al-Faleh said the women were arrested Thursday at the home of Rima Al-Juraish, one of 13 women who staged a sit-in outside the offices of state security in Buraidah on Monday. The women were demanding that their husbands or brothers, held on suspicion of involvement in a wave of violence that began in May 2003, either receive a public trial or be released.
Security forces have rounded up hundreds of suspected Al-Qaeda militants since a spate of shootings and bombings started in the Kingdom four years ago.
Al-Hamed is the legal representative of Juraish’s husband, Mohammad Al-Hamli, who has been in detention for three years. He and his brother were arrested outside Juraish’s house.
“Two men were arrested while trying to slip through the security cordon around the location and refusing to obey the instructions of the security men,” the Saudi Press Agency said yesterday.
Al-Faleh told Arab News in a phone interview yesterday from Riyadh that Al-Hamed probably refused to answer the questions of the security forces because a lawyer was not present. “Dr. Abdullah would not accept any questioning without having a lawyer present,” said Al-Faleh.
Al-Turki said that security forces, acting on information that weapons were hidden in a house in Buraidah, searched the location on Thursday. They found “three machine guns and five boxes of ammunition for various weapons buried underground in the courtyard, in addition to three pistols in a room,” Turki said.
Al-Faleh said that he could not believe that weapons had been found in the house of one of the women, because he said that they did not believe in the use of violence. “The women’s sit-in was a nonviolent form of protest for their husbands and brothers who are being detained,” he said.
According to Al-Faleh, the women who were arrested Thursday, along with seven of their children, included: Rima Al-Juraish, wife of detainee Mohammad Al-Amli; Manal Al-Amairini, wife of detainee Khaled Al-Sawi; Badriah Al-Amairini, wife of detainee Adel Al-Khaldi; and Afrah Al-Fehaid and Ashwaq Al-Fehaid, sisters of detainee Hani Al-Fehaid.
At around midnight on Monday, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice arrived on the site of the peaceful protest and seized the women. They were later released early the next morning.
Al-Turki said five women who were in the house on Thursday “tried to obstruct the search.” Four were interrogated and released while the fifth was still being held for further interrogation “in the presence of her legal guardian.”
Al-Hamed and his brother were arrested when “they tried to break through the security cordon set up by security forces around the location” and refused to be interrogated in order to “establish their connection to the matter,” Al-Turki added.
