Christian Arrested for Entering Muslim Only City
Maybe the Sri Lankan Christian missed the prominent highway signs warning non-Muslims to stay off the Saudi highways leading to Mecca. Perhaps Nirosh Kmanda, found while hawking goods in Mecca, hadn’t intended to challenge Muslim apartheid, but was merely trying to eke out a living. The Christian was nevertheless arrested for daring to step on holy Muslim soil. The Jerusalem Post reports:
After running his fingerprints through a new security system, Saudi police discovered that he was a Christian who had arrived in the country six months earlier to take a job as a truck driver in the city of Dammam. Kamanda had subsequently left his place of work and moved to Mecca.
“The Grand Mosque and the holy city are forbidden to non-Muslims,” Col. Suhail Matrafi, head of the department of Expatriates Affairs in Mecca, told the Saudi daily Arab News. “The new fingerprints system is very helpful and will help us a lot to discover the identity of a lot of criminals,” he said.
Similar restrictions apply to the Saudi city of Medina. In a section entitled, “Traveler’s Information,” the Web site of the Saudi Embassy in Washington states that, “Mecca and Medina hold special religious significance and only persons of the Islamic faith are allowed entry.”
Highway signs at the entrance to Mecca also direct non-Muslims away from the city’s environs.
Sadly, apartheid roads do indeed exist in the Middle East.
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