'An Austere Version of Mainstream Sunni Islamic Law'

If you ever needed any reaffirmation that life in Saudi Arabia is some kind of bizarre nightmare, read no further than this item. Life there is some kind of warped inverted reality, where logic and sanity have no place.

A Saudi lawyer said on Sunday he had filed an appeal against two members of the religious police over the death of a Saudi man last year.

A court last November acquitted two employees of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice of killing Salman al-Huraisy last year after the morality squad raided his home and seized some alcohol.

The same court this month upheld the ruling but the case will go to appeal, said Abdul-Rahman al-Lahem, a leading human rights lawyer.

In a statement sent to Reuters, Lahem said the appeal, filed on June 4, would rest on the United Nations Convention Against Torture, signed by Saudi Arabia in 1997.

He also questioned the reasoning used by the judges in their definition of murder, which was based on their reading of Islamic sharia law.

"The verdict was based on the jurisprudential argument that (a blow to) the head cannot cause death and that the hand is not an instrument that can cause death, therefore it cannot be premeditated murder," he wrote in a statement.

Some of Huraisy's family say they saw him badly beaten by two men and an autopsy report said severe head injuries were the cause of death.

The religious police have wide powers to search for alcohol, drugs and prostitution, ensure shops are closed during prayer and maintain a strict system of sexual segregation in Saudi society that even bans women from driving.

These religious police apparently also have the right to murder people.

Sickening.