Saudi police detain woman in miniskirt video
A Saudi woman has been arrested for a video shared online that showed her strolling along an empty street wearing a skirt and crop top.
Videos initially posted over the weekend to the Snapchat account of Model Khulood show a young woman in a high-waisted miniskirt walking through a fort in Ushaiqer, outside Riyadh.
She plays in the dunes and turns towards the camera for a close-up, with her long hair uncovered.
The videos have since been uploaded to YouTube and tweeted by different users.
The woman was being questioned and had confessed to visiting the site with her male guardian, a police spokesman in Riyadh said.
She denied that she had uploaded the clips and that the Snapchat account was hers.
Her case has now been referred to the public prosecutor’s office, which will decide whether to prosecute.
Riyadh’s local government had issued a memo saying authorities were searching for the woman who had been “walking around in indecent clothing”.
The snaps have sparked heated debate, with social media users in the region and beyond weighing in on questions of gender and rights in the kingdom, where women are required to wear long black abayas and cover their hair in public.
Many have come to the defence of the young woman, pointing out the privileges afforded to western women by Saudi authorities.
The United States first lady Melania Trump and Ivanka Trump, daughter of the president, did not cover their hair when they visited Saudi Arabia in May.
“If it were Trump’s daughter, we would have braced ourselves for the flood of compliments and love poems,” read one tweet.
“Problem solved,” tweeted Shahd bint Fahd, alongside a picture in which the young woman had Ivanka Trump’s face superimposed over the original.
But the video clip has incensed some social media users in the kingdom who vented their anger using the hashtag “Model Khulood must be tried”.
Others expressed outrage and derided those speaking out in support of the model.