BEIRUT, Lebanon - A leading international human rights group appealed to Saudi King Abdullah on Thursday to stop the execution of a woman accused of witchcraft and performing supernatural occurrences.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a statement that the kingdom's religious police which arrested and interrogated Fawza Falih, and the judges who tried her in the northern town of Quraiyat never gave her the opportunity to prove her innocence in the face of "absurd charges that have no basis in law."

The judges relied on Falih's coerced confession and on the statements of witnesses who said she had "bewitched" them to convict her in April 2006, according to HRW.

Withcraft is considered an offense against Islam in the conservative kingdom

The Saudi court cited one instance, in which a man allegedly became impotent after being bewitched by Falih, and another, when a divorced woman reportedly returned to her ex-husband during the month predicted by the witch who allegedly cast a spell, HRW said.

Source


Imagine in Ryan Kn*x could charge women ...

How the hell has the middle east kept up with us fairly well in technology but still managed to be hundreds of years behind us in terms of sanity???

Its the fucking Middle East. Nothing makes sense there. I say blow it up all to hell.

She turned me into a newt.

Nice to see the way the Saudi's treat women has evolved from Cro-Magnon and caught up to the rest of the 14th century.

^Nice Pic, Ms. Jerkins. But be careful: I think the Saudi's will execute you for that as well.

Just imagine what the Saudi's would do to someone like Tritone or Vanessa.

I think heroin and female circumcision are the only things that have ever been developed in the middle east. They "keep up" with technology because they buy it from the outside. Just like they can produce oil because outsiders go in and operate the oil wells.

Female genital mutilation is very common in African Islam, but most of the African arabs don't participate [illegal in Algeria, for example].

I'm not sure about Saudi Arabia or Palestine ... but 85-95% of women in Egypt have been ruined.

There was a time when the muslim world far outpaced the West in terms of science and technology, even preserving such the works of such Western geniuses as galen and Archimedes.

That period ended with the Rennaisance, however, and they've been bitching about it ever since.