Saudi judge's drug arrest

Confusion surrounded the arrest of a senior Saudi Sharia judge on drugs charges in Dubai this week, as Saudi authorities insisted they’d never heard of the detained man.

The Khaleej Times reported that top Sharia judge Hamad Salim bin Naif and his wife had been busted with four grams of cannabis in his hotel room though two days later the Saudi Justice Ministry disputed the story. However, on the same day the Al-Riyadh newspaper reported from Dubai that the judge ‘has been teaching at a Saudi university and used to lead prayers at a mosque in Jeddah while he served as a judge.” (ArabNews)

Arab News also quoted ‘unnamed sources’ in the Dubai police who said; “The man is in his 40s while the wife is her early 30s. The occupation on his passport shows that he was a judge,” the source added. Whether the ‘judge’ will spend much time with jailed drum & bass DJ Grooverider in the near future remains unclear, though he’ll presumably be in even more trouble if he makes it back to Saudi where drug criminals are regularly executed.

In more Saudi legal news, a senior member of the Saudi Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice was arrested recently for having six wives simultaneously. The 56 year old vice cop reportedly had three wives in Saudi and three more across the border in Yemen, press reports said, though he denied being a criminal, claiming he’d previously divorced two of them (to keep within Sharia’s four wife legal limit).

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