Free Republic

A Turkish newspaper employee was tackled to the floor during an attack by burqa-clad women accusing the six-months pregnant victim of being a “Gulenist” and wearing “revealing” clothes that violate sharia law. The women were accompanied by a man who warned she was one of four other “targets” they would attack. Hazal Ölmez, an employee at the newspaper Evrensel, was walking home from work in Istanbul when three people, two of them women wearing burqas, slammed her to the floor. “Why are you wearing revealing clothes? You are a coup supporter and a Gülenist,” the group reportedly yelled at her....

Riyadh - A Saudi Arabian court has convicted and sentenced 20 foreigners to receive lashes and spend several months in prison for attending a party where alcoholic drinks were served and men and women danced, a Saudi newspaper reported on Sunday. The kingdom's religious police arrested 433 foreigners, including more than 240 women, for attending the "impudent" party in Jiddah, the state-guided newspaper Okaz reported. It did not identify the foreigners, give their nationalities or say when the party took place. Judge Saud al-Boushi sentenced the 20 to three to four month in prison and ordered them to receive an...

RIYADH, Dec 8 (Reuters) - The leader of the al Qaeda attack on the U.S. consulate in Saudi Arabia had been jailed for "extremist ideology" and once worked for the kingdom's austere morality police, local newspapers said on Wednesday. Saudi dailies said Fayez Awad al-Jihani was the head of an al Qaeda cell in the Red Sea city of Jeddah, where the brazen daylight attack on the U.S. consulate took place on Monday. Jihani was one of four attackers who died in the assault. A fifth was wounded and arrested. Saudi authorities identified three of the assailants, none of whom...

WHEN Andrea Pia Yates drowned her five children because, she claimed, she wanted to save them from hell by killing them in the innocence of their youth, it was either mental illness or cold-blooded murder. Certainly, it was a misguided application of the Christian faith Yates practiced. Her crime seemed like a clear result of mental illness to me. To jurors who evaluated the evidence, it sounded like murder, and they sentenced her to life in prison. When 15 schoolgirls burned alive in March because religious police in the Saudi Arabian city of Mecca prevented them from fleeing a blazing...