From: Sonia Verma – Fox
Two weeks before Yara, an American businesswoman, was arrested by Saudi Arabia’s religious police for sitting with a male colleague at Starbucks, she said she strolled past the very same cafe with another businessman: Neil Bush.
Bush, President George W. Bush’s younger brother and CEO of the education software company Ignite!, was in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, speaking at an economic forum hosted by King Abdullah for hundreds of influential business leaders.
Yara, who does not want her last name revealed because of safety concerns, is a managing partner at a Saudi financial company. She went to hear Bush speak, and she said she invited him later to tour her company’s offices, to give him a sense of what life was really like for women living in the capital.
“I was boasting about Riyadh, telling him it doesn’t deserve its bad reputation,” she said. “I told him I never experienced any harassment. I’d had no trouble as a woman. It was business as usual.”
But on Monday, Yara learned that she had been wrong. She was thrown in jail, strip-searched, threatened and forced to sign false confessions by the kingdom’s “Mutaween” police.
“When I was arrested, it was like going through an avalanche,” she said. “All of my beliefs were completely destroyed.”
Yara’s crime: sitting with a male business partner in the “family-only” section of the Starbucks — the only area of the café where women and men can sit together. In Saudi Arabia, public contact between unrelated men and women is strictly prohibited.
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