Saudi woman killed for chatting on Facebook

This is unbelievable.

read and weep.

Saudi woman killed for chatting on Facebook
By Damien McElroy
Foreign Affairs Correspondent
Last Updated: 12:53pm BST 31/03/2008



A young Saudi Arabian woman was murdered by her father for
chatting on the social network site Facebook, it has emerged.

The
unnamed woman from Riyadh was beaten and shot after she was discovered in the
middle of an online conversation with a man, the al-Arabiya website reported.

The case was reported on a Saudi Arabian news site as an example of the
"strife" the social networking site is causing in the Islamic nation.

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Saudi preacher Ali al-Maliki has emerged as the
leading critic of Facebook, claiming the network is corrupting the youth of the
nation.

"Facebook is a door to lust and young women and men are spending
more on their mobile phones and the Internet than they are spending on food," he
said.

The woman was murdered in August but her death was highlighted
following Maliki's comments.

Social customs and religious rules oblige
women in Saudi Arabia to cover their head and figure with a veil so that men are
not distracted by the female form.

Critics also allege that Facebook is
an avenue for the promotion of homosexual relations in Saudi Arabia. More than
6,500 people have signed the online petition in a bid to stop the conservative
Muslim kingdom following Syria in banning access to the network from local
internet servers.

There are estimated to be more than 30,000 Facebook
users in the oil-rich kingdom. Many Saudi women use nicknames and post comic
images or drawings on their pages instead of photographs. Some Saudi bloggers
have dubbed the network "Faceless".

Women users' contact details and
email addresses are often pseudonymous. The popularity of sites for singles has
broken taboos on people making contact outside family and class connections.

One of the most popular Facebook groups among Saudi Arabian youth is
Single and Looking in Saudi Arabia, which has 1,823 members and hosts many
sexually explicit images.