Makkah harasser gets 1,000 lashes, 4 years

A Saudi court sentenced an African man to four years in prison and ordered him lashed 1,000 after he was convicted of pretending to be a pilgrim to harass women at the Grand Mosque in the Gulf Kingdom, a newspaper reported on Thursday.

After reading the sentence, the judge at the court in the Western town of Makkah told the defendant he could not appeal on the grounds what he had done “is a very serious crime and a violation of the sacred mosque.”

Guards the Grand Mosque in Makkah, Islam’s holiest shrine, arrested the man after they saw him on security cameras coming too close to female pilgrims and touching them. They also found that he was wearing normal clothes under Ihram dress (white ritual uniform), proving he was at the mosque for harassing women.

“He confessed to the crime after he was faced with a film caught by security cameras inside the Grand Mosque,” Alwatan daily said.

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