On Monday, March 11, 2002, a fire destroyed a school in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, killing 15 girls — most of whom were crushed to death in a panic to exit the building. But rescue efforts at the fire were hampered when members of Saudi Arabia’ religious police — the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice — refused to allow either girls to leave the building or firefighters to enter the building. The reason? The girls were not wearing their traditional head scarves or black robes.
The English-language Saudi Gazette quoted witnesses as saying that a member of the COmmission told men trying to enter the building to try to save the girls that, “it is sinful to approach them” because they were not wearing the required garb.
Meanwhile, a civil defense officer told Saudi Arabian newspaper al-Eqtisadiah that he saw members of the Commission “being young girls to prevent them from leaving the school because they were not wearing the abaya . . . We told them that the situation was very critical and did not allow for such behavior. But they shouted at us and refused to move away from the [school’s] gates.”
The official response from the Saudi Arabian government has been to claim that the people blocking access to the school were not really members of the Commission. In an article in the Saudi English-language newspaper Arab News, the Civil Defense Department now claims that it has information “which casts doubt on whether the members of the Commission for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice who allegedly played a role in hampering rescue operation at the fire-hit Makkah girls? school were really members of the organization.”
As the Wall Street Journal put it, this claim smacks of a bad cover-up, but either way this is exactly the sort of attitude toward women and girls that Saudi Arabia’s leaders have long promoted with their funding and promotion of Islamic extremism.
Source:
Were commission members at fire tragedy impostors? Khaled Al-Fadly & Saeed Al-Abyad, Arab News, March 17, 2002.
Saudi police face deaths criticism. Reuters, March 14, 2002.