Posted on 03/15/2002 11:51:59 PM PST by kattracks
RIYADH, March 14 (AFP) - Saudi Arabia's religious police stood accused Thursday of preventing the rescue of 14 girls who died in a stampede because an effort to save them would have meant men entering a girls' school or girls leaving without wearing a veil.
Al-Iqtissadiya newspaper quoted witnesses saying the religious police, or "mutawa", who enforce a strict Islamic moral code in the kingdom, "prevented" the girls aged from 13-17 from getting out of the school because they were not wearing the obligatory head veil.
At the same time, civil defence guards were blocked from entering the school to aid the girls because it would have infringed on the policy of separation of the sexes, the daily said.
It demanded "the departure" of the head of female education in Saudi Arabia, Ali Al-Morshed for failing "to apply security rules" in the school of 700 students.
In a letter to Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz published in Okaz newspaper, Saudi writer Abdel Aziz Al-Sowaigh said "the mentality and sterile methods practiced by the department of female education is behind the tragedy."
Police announced that 14 girls were trampled to death and 50 more hurt in the stampede after a fire broke out in the school at Mecca on Monday.
Witnesses reported that the students could not get out of the school as the key to the main gate was kept by a caretaker who was not on the compound at the time.
Girls schools are strictly guarded in Saudi Arabia to prevent men from entering or pupils from leaving without authorisation.
Al-Iqtissadiya quoted a civil defence report as saying "people claiming to be in the religious police ... hampered rescue efforts and prevented the evacuation of students."
However, Civil Defence chief General Saad Al-Towaijri told the daily that his men "faced up to the situation without any hindrance from anyone."
Newspaper quoted civil defence officers, students and witnesses saying a fight erupted at the entrance to the school between police and people who said they were part of the religious police.
One officer said girls without veils had been prevented from "fleeing".
A schoolgirl told the Mecca newspaper Al-Nadwa that "members of the religious police prevented firemen from entering the school," to put out the flames.
"No one died of the fire. The girls rushed to the gate to escape and the victims were trampled to death," a security official said.
The fact is that Arab men hate dark skins. That is why I laugh when blacks want to be Moslems. Arabs hate blacks--they have enslaved them for centuries and they convert them, but still consider them below camels. What they treasure are light skins. They keep these veils on these women so that the sun won't touch their skin--which in that part of the world would mean that they would get tanned. And Arab men want as light a skin as possible on these women. They use women. They abuse women. They pervert women into believing that selling their sons (and now daughters) to become a walking bombs (I won't call them martyrs, because they don't believe in anything).
Blacks who think that Arabs like them are in dreamland. There is something sick in these Arab minds--hate, inferiority complexes, perversion. I don't know how to describe it. It needs a psychiatrist to understand how they can lie to themselves about a sick 'religion' and use it to justify all their crimes. I would like to hear from an historian as to exactly where these people are coming from and what they were like before they became Moslems.
Makes sense to me.
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