Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
A Nigerian convert to Islam was jailed last week for helping his elderly female neighbor. Ibrahim Mohammed Lawal, a student of Islamic studies in Riyadh, found his neighbor ill and took her to a hospital. Soon he was picked up by officers from the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, who pronounced him guilty of being alone with a woman not of his family. The commission refused to say how long he would be detained. “I wanted to do a good thing for a woman who was sick,” Mohammed told the Riyadh Arab News, “and here I am languishing in prison.”
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