DAILY MAIL: When a teenage girl was gang raped in Saudi Arabia,a court sentenced HER to 90 lashes. After she complained,it was increased to 200. Now, the victim speaks for the first time...
She was only 19 and a new bride when it happened.
Seven men held her at knifepoint and, for a number of hours, she was subjected to a horrific gang rape.
But when she later went to the authorities, they sentenced her to 90 lashes.
She complained in the media, so the punishment was increased to 200 lashes and imprisonment.
Her lawyer has been suspended for speaking out against it.
Too outlandish to be true? Well, these are the bare facts of the so- called "Qatif girl" case, which has become a cause celebre among Western liberals and in Saudi Arabia, the West's most important Middle Eastern ally.
Earlier this week, the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, declared that what had happened was, indeed, an "outrage".
But he did not mean that the rape victim had suffered a gross injustice.
No, only that criticism of his country was a foreign conspiracy.
The plight of the anonymous victim has served to cast an embarrassing light on one of the world's most authoritarian and oppressive regimes.
Specifically, it has exposed the power of a judicial system based on the Sharia law of the extreme Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam and its appalling treatment of women and persecution of religious minorities.
International pressure to clear the young woman is growing.
Now, as one Saudi judge who might well hear her latest appeal declares that she should have been sentenced to death, the victim's voice has been heard in public for the first time.
The pressure group Human Rights Watch has just released a transcript of an interview which the Qatif girl gave to one of its workers.
Her account reveals the horrific details of the original ordeal and how, having gone to the police, she was abused and demonised by the Saudi judicial system. My harrowing story, by the teenage girl who was sentenced to 200 lashes after being gang raped in Saudi Arabia >>> By Richard Pendlebury
Mark Alexander
