A group fight among female inmates erupted Tuesday at Makkah Girls Correction Facility in which five girls sustained injuries, authorities said. Police rushed to the scene with the help of women jailers to enter the shelter and disperse the 46 rioters, some of whom were arrested because they were thought to have started the fight. The injured were taken to King Abdul Aziz Hospital by the Red Crescent, police said. Other government departments were also involved in attending the incident including the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (the Hai'a), Social Affairs, Board of Control and Investigation and teams from Research and Criminal Evidence, according to authorities. Major Abdulmohsen Al-Maiman, spokesman of Makkah Police, said authorities received a report that a fight broke out at the shelter and that some girls had sustained injuries. “The investigation to determine the causes of the incident is still going on, in preparation to refer the case to the Bureau of Investigation and Prosecution,” he said. Sources told Okaz/Saudi Gazette that the fight erupted when one girl misbehaved and a social worker denied her to receive visitors. That decision annoyed some of the other girls, who created chaos and destroyed parts of the facility. Sources said some inmates participated in the fight without knowing its real motives. They used cleaning tools, sticks and other tools and some girls were rendered unconscious. Noura Aal Alsheikh, women's supervisor in the Western Region, has started investigating the incident and prevented the social workers and their supervisor from leaving the site until the investigation is complete. This incident followed a series of fights at this Ministry of Social Affairs' poorly maintained and much –criticized facility, which hosts women with convictions ranging from murder, carrying a weapon, escape, kidnapping, shooting, adultery, becoming pregnant illegitimately and stealing. In Jan., a Bureau of Investigation and Prosecution report found that there was “chaos” at the facility after investigating a similar riot. The Bureaus report found that members of the facility administration tried to silence inmates by transferring them to other facilities, preventing family visits, and holding inmates in solitary confinement. A report by the National Society for Human Rights (NSHR) on this facility found that there was widespread abuse of inmates, including lack of access to medical care, little or no access to families, unhygienic food, solitary confinement and beating by women prison guards. In April, about 16 women were involved in a brawl at the facility, forcing the police to intervene. The brawl started with a quarrel between an inmate in her twenties and another pregnant woman. Other inmates then got involved and it developed into a fight between two groups. Ali Al-Hinaki, Director General of Social Affairs in Makkah Region, accused the female inmates of exaggerating the conditions at the facility. He again claimed that allegations of the women being abused were untrue. He said the ministry was dealing with difficult women, who had been subjected to violence and torture. Complaints from inmates in shelters throughout the country generally focus on poor treatment by the shelters' staff, delays in addressing their cases in courts, a lack of suitable buildings and negligence in following up their social and psychological cases.
