Saudi says moral police custody deaths overblown

RIYADH, July 2 (Reuters) Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef has played down recent cases of prisoners dying in the custody of religious police and said media was exaggerating ''simple negative things'', a newspaper reported today.

Following a spate of unexplained deaths, Saudi media have criticised the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice - whose wide powers enforce bans on drugs, alcohol and prostitution - and called for it to be disbanded.

Clerics say the group is key to ensuring the rule of Saudi Arabia's austere form of Sunni Islam, often termed Wahhabism.

Saudi critics say the body, whose members intervene to stop unrelated men and women from mixing in public and sometimes interrogate people to check if their beliefs fit with Saudi Arabia's Islamic orthodoxy, is an affront to civil rights.

''I want to say that unfortunately the Committee is being targeted, even by the media who pick up the simple negative things, then blow them up and damage the Committee,'' the minister was quoted as saying by the al-Watan newspaper.

''Don't these people know that promoting virtue and prohibiting vice is a pillar of Islam?'' The senior Saudi royal - one of the key backers of the morality police - was speaking after an address to the Shura Council, Saudi Arabia's unelected quasi-parliament which last month rejected a Committee request for more funding to set up new offices around the vast desert country.

This week four members of the autonomous force went on trial after a 50-year-old man died in their custody in the northern town of Tabuk. The man had been arrested for driving with an unrelated woman.

A trial is also due to begin against at least one member of the force over the death last month of a 28-year-old man who was arrested for possession of alcohol. His family says he was beaten to death in front of them during detention.

A woman has also filed a suit for compensation, saying Committee members crashed her car after seizing it. They had stopped her for indecency because they said she was not covering her face.

REUTERS RN BST1755