Inside the Kingdom (58 page)

“You must not be hasty. You must sit down and talk to her,” he instructed his nephew, who was nearing the end of his studies at the University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran. But when Fouad met with the couple, he saw that the girl had been traumatized in some way. She was terrified to speak.

“Will you give me my rights?” she blurted out aggressively after Fouad had asked his nephew to leave the two of them alone.

“What I can promise,” he replied, “is that I will not pass on anything you say unless you are willing.”

And so, for the first time, the “Qateef girl” spilled out the sensational story that would provoke headlines around the world in the closing months of 2007—and would provide a metaphor for all that was wrong, and a few things that were right, inside King Abdullah’s Saudi Arabia. Before getting engaged to Mahdi, the girl confessed, she had been persuaded to hand over a picture of herself to a girlfriend who had passed it on to a male relative, a good-looking boy a year or so younger than them named Hassan, who would sometimes drive the two girls to the mall.

“Can I see her picture?” is a matchmaking ploy very common among young Saudis, so restricted in their opportunities to meet and date. Pakistani- and Indian-run picture studios do a roaring trade in Saudi souks—providing, in this case, a kitschy photograph that, as Fouad remembers it, showed the Qateef girl standing against a baby blue backdrop. The picture had been taken two years earlier. Her head was covered, and she was dressed demurely in a black skirt and orange top, posing beside a small plastic tree that had been copiously laden with every imagineable variety of plastic fruit.

The Qateef girl had never been alone with Hassan, she told Fouad, nor had she ever lifted her veil to show the boy her face. But after her family arranged her contract of marriage to Mahdi, she had started to worry about the photograph being in Hassan’s possession. Affection had flowered between the newly betrothed couple, and the girl had also discovered that Mahdi was fiercely possessive. She characterized her fiancé-husband as
hemish,
an Egyptian colloquialism that male Saudis sometimes apply to being fully “in charge” of their women. Not wanting to risk losing the man she now loved, she contacted her girlfriend to ask if she could get the picture back.

The girlfriend reported a complication. Hassan wanted to meet his picture pal one last time. He would hand over the picture, he promised, at City Plaza, a mini-mall a couple of hundred yards from her family home, but only if he could meet her privately. So being keen to get the whole thing over, the Qateef girl set off from home, walking the distance to the mall by the time agreed, around 9 P.M. that night.

She was not at all pleased with Hassan for compelling her to go through this, and as she turned left off her street and started walking along the main road she grew still more annoyed when a car slowed down to crawl alongside her, its three male occupants leaning across to make suggestive comments. As she hurried into the mall, she upbraided Hassan for tipping off the men, whom she presumed to be his cronies. But he swore he knew nothing—and he was as horrified as she was when they escaped together through the mall’s rear door, to find the men in their vehicle waiting there for them. As the couple drove away, they were followed by their pursuers, who, the moment that they were off the main street, overtook them and forced them off the road. A foolish escapade was turning into a scarcely believable true-life nightmare. At knifepoint, two of the gangsters forced their captives out of their vehicle and onto the floor in the back of their own car, where one sat in the middle with a foot planted firmly on each of them.

“Come on over!” they could hear him boasting on the phone to his friends. “We’ve got a boy and a girl for tonight!”

Fouad Al-Mushaikhis could not believe what he was hearing. But it got worse. His nephew’s wife described how, arriving at a rough farm, the Qateef girl’s abaya was pulled off and she was dragged out of the car into a primitive majlis-style room. There were cushions around the walls, with a rough and dirty woven palm mat in the middle of the floor. Four more men had arrived, their headdresses swathed around their faces like balaclavas so she could not see their features. They told her to take off her clothes and to get ready for some “fun.” When she refused to strip, they beat her with palm fronds and ripped off the thin shift she was wearing beneath her abaya. She pleaded with them, telling them that she was married and from a good family. She called out to God, but they just laughed at her. Then they pushed her down onto the thin palm mat and raped her one by one. As they waited their turn, the men made videos on their mobile phones, leering and cheering from their cushions around the room.

“If you talk,” they threatened, “we will spread these movies all around.”

The girl’s ordeal went on for hours—till 2 A.M. she later reckoned—and while it was going on, four of the attackers tied up Hassan, then raped and videotaped him as well.

Fouad was in tears. He could not believe what he was hearing. The girl took forty minutes to get through her story. The final video-blackmailing detail convinced Fouad that the attackers were an organized gang who routinely kidnapped victims and had carried out these rape orgies before. They had worked out every detail, even copying the contact numbers from their victims’ cell phones before they let them go. They understood Saudi society. Such is the importance of “face” in this family-based culture that it is not unknown for families to seek out their daughters’ violators and pay them for their silence. The men who raped the Qateef girl had every reason to believe that the Shia community of Qateef would connive in their crime.

Fouad, who surely represents modernity in this drama, pondered for a week what to do. He was distraught. He found it difficult to do any work, and he spent a lot of time out walking, leaving his home so that his own family should not see his distress. He met with the girl again to try to get the details straight, then called another meeting with the couple.

“There is a really big problem that we have to face,” he told his nephew. “When you hear what has happened, you will be shocked, and you are going to have to be strong. You have got to act as a man and stand by your wife—even though your family, when they hear what has happened, will insist that you have got to divorce.”

Mahdi listened—then did as his uncle said. He stood by his woman. His sense of hemish made him determined to take his revenge on her violators, and the young man’s aggression showed Fouad the way ahead. He could hardly have pursued the cause of the Qateef girl without the support of her future husband. Fouad had determined to play Sherlock Holmes.

“Do you remember anything about the men?” he asked.

The problem with bringing the rapists to justice was a total lack of solid evidence. When the girl had finally got home after the attack, sobbing and semicomatose, her family had assumed she was suffering from a problem she had long had with anemia. They rushed her to hospital, where she did not mention being raped. So she was not examined internally and no DNA samples were taken—not that any such procedure would have been guaranteed. Saudi hospitals have no standardized protocol for processing rape allegations, and in some emergency rooms it remains routine for doctors—male or female—to refuse to hear or acknowledge what the assaulted patient is trying to say.

Fouad knew that the local police would be worse. Even when presented with evidence, they would presume provocation on the part of the woman: her rendezvous with Hassan would sink her cause fatally. So what could the Qateef girl say to prove her innocence?

“I remember,” she told Fouad, “that some of the men had a very strong smell. They smelt of something like fish.”

Sherlock Holmes had his clue. Fouad contacted Hassan, whose intransigence had started the trouble. The boy could make some amends, Fouad told him, by accompanying him to the bustling Qateef fish market, the main fish market of the Saudi east coast, where he would have to walk slowly past the various stalls. It was Fouad’s plan to follow at a distance and see if anyone reacted to Hassan’s presence.

Fouad and Hassan went twice to the fish market, and on the second visit the plan worked. As the boy walked down the central aisle of the long and narrow fish shed, awash with pungent water and glittering fish scales, Fouad saw two stallholders nudging each other with alarm. They vanished together behind their high freezer cabinet, and did not reemerge until Hassan had safely passed.

Now Fouad needed confirmation from the other victim.

“They won’t be able to see you,” he reassured her, “through your veil.”

The Qateef girl went to the stall as directed, and haggled over some fish. It was good fish, she later told Fouad, but she refused to hand over a single riyal to the animals who had abused her. She was terrified and had nearly fainted on the spot. Yes, she confirmed—the two men who had hidden behind their freezer were indeed the men who abducted her.

Fouad now had two suspects, and in the days that followed he gathered names and phone numbers and license plate details. He wrote everything down on a sheet of A4 paper, highlighting the main points, in the form of a letter from Mahdi asking for justice. “My wife has been raped,” it stated bluntly. But Fouad did not take it to the police. He went instead to the majlis of the royal governor of the Eastern Province, Prince Mohammed bin Fahd.

Here is the next point to ponder in this ancient and modern morality tale. Mohammed, the eldest son of the late King Fahad, has presided over two decades of spectacular growth in Saudi Arabia’s oil province, and his multifarious family businesses, run by his brother and his sons, have profited from it spectacularly. This linkage between public position and private profit would raise ethical questions in other parts of the world, but in Saudi Arabia it is the way things get done. Mohammed bin Fahd has many critics in the Kingdom’s largest and most prosperous province, which he governs—but it was thanks to him that the rapists were brought to justice.

“I could tell from the prince’s face,” remembers Fouad. “He was totally shocked by some of the details. I had highlighted them in bold on the piece of paper that I gave to him. His color changed. ‘Why haven’t you gone to the Qateef police?’ he asked. ‘I’m more afraid of them,’ I told him, ‘than I am of those criminals.’ ”

A few days later Fouad was sitting at a table in the Dammam Corniche waterfront park talking to two Mabahith colonels, and as he watched the detectives gently interrogating his nephew’s wife, he could not help admiring the way they went about their work. The colonels had been chosen by the prince’s office to supervise the case, and over the days that followed they selected an investigative team that quickly got results. After making their own inquiries, the detectives arrested the two fish sellers, who promptly surrendered the names of their accomplices. Several of them confessed. As events took a positive turn, Mahdi and his wife decided that they would move in together, taking up residence in Mahdi’s mother’s house, not far from Qateef’s Shia burial ground, and just across the street from Fouad’s home. Adversity had helped them become fully man and wife.

Fouad assumed that justice would now take its course, but he had not reckoned on the Saudi court system, based on the shariah, God’s eternal and unchanging law, derived from the Koran and the Hadith (Islamic traditions). Since law is a branch of religion, it follows that all Saudi judges are religious sheikhs, most of them of a conservative and distinctly Wahhabi inclination, very concerned to encourage their own view of virtue and to discourage vice, particularly when that vice might involve bidaa, innovations, of a Western nature. This meant, in the case of the Qateef girl, that the three judges started their deliberations by focusing on the premarital relationship that had drawn the young woman to the City Plaza that fateful night. This was the single undisputed offense before the court. The rapists had withdrawn their confessions and were now pleading innocence, while the girl’s signed “confession” to the police remained on the record.