Copping it with religion

A 70-year-old Saudi woman was briefly jailed after being detained by the religious police who suspected her motives for entering a shop owned by a man in a busy Riyadh market.

Members of the dreaded Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, known as Mutawas, descended on the shop in the capital's Al-Deira market after the woman entered the shop while there was no one inside except the male owner, the Al-Hayat reported. "The commission suspected the woman was in 'unlawful seclusion' with the owner despite the fact that the shop's shutters were wide open," the paper said, employing a term commonly used in Saudi Arabia's puritanical society to describe a sexual liaison.

The Interior Ministry has issued a decree aimed at reining in the Mutawas by requiring them not to interrogate detained suspects, as they previously did, but to hand them over to police.