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While the Prince Is Away . . .

Saudi Arabia's religious police crack down.

Jun 13, 2005, Vol. 10, No. 37 • By PAUL MARSHALL
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SINCE MAY 27, THE Saudis have arrested eight Christians from India and seized documents naming others. One of those arrested, Chittirical John Thomas, was pulled away from work and beaten in front of his five-year-old son. He is reportedly in the Shemaissy Detention Center.

This followed the March 22 arrest in the Batha area of Riyadh of Indian pastor Samkutty Varghese by the religious police, the muttawa, for not ending a cell phone conversation when the call for Muslim prayer went out. Rev. Varghese, who went to Saudi Arabia as a tourist in January, was apparently not aware of rules forbidding calls at such times. He is still being held, and there are reports that he has been sentenced to ten months in prison, as well as to a flogging.

The muttawa were unusually busy while Crown Prince Abdullah was away in Texas visiting President Bush. On April 23, they arrested 40 Pakistani Christians who were engaged in a joint Catholic-Protestant meeting in a home. On April 29, they arrested five Christians from an Ethiopian and Eritrean group who had gathered for prayer.

Sources in Saudi Arabia believe that authorities there are using the information they have gathered from these raids in order to organize crackdowns elsewhere in the country. Saudi security officials are busily arresting people whose phone numbers were found in Rev. Varghese's diary.

Despite the Saudis' expressions of concern over press reports that U.S. officials at Guantanamo Bay desecrated Korans, their own security authorities have destroyed Bibles found among the victims' possessions, just as they destroyed religious artifacts found in a raid on a makeshift Hindu shrine found in an apartment in Riyadh on March 24.

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