Riyadh  - Saudi cleric Saleh al-Luhaidan, chairman of the Saudi Supreme Judicial Council, has issued a fatwa permitting the murder of the owners of Arabic satellite TV channels which broadcast programmes that encourage immorality, media reports said Friday.

The Dubai-based al-Arabiya news channel broadcasted a sound recording of al-Luhaidan speaking to a Saudi radio station.

The Saudi cleric said that these satellite channels caused the "deviance of thousands of people" as they show "seduction, obscenity and vulgarity."

Riyadh - Saudi Arabian police have arrested five men on charges of being involved in preparing internet propaganda in support of al-Qaeda, the Arabic television station al-Arabiya has reported.

According to a statement released by Saudi Arabia's interior ministry, three Saudi nationals, a Syrian and an Egyptian were charged with "spreading misleading propaganda on the internet."

Saudi Arabia has battled with a home-grown insurgency by al-Qaeda

Riyadh - Saudi Arabia on Thursday executed two Pakistani nationals for smuggling drugs, a statement by the interior ministry said.

Riyadh - Saudi Arabia's grand mufti has banned birthda

Riyadh  - After a major frenzy over two widely-viewed Turkish soap operas the Saudi Trade Ministry has started to shut down stores that sell t-shirts with pictures of the good-looking soap stars on them, reports said Thursday.

The two Arabic-dubbed Turkish soap operas have captured the attention of viewers all over the Arab world with many women staying home every night waiting for the episode to be aired.

Riyadh - Saudi Arabia's highest religious authority slammed Turkish soap operas, now hugely popular in the Middle East, as being "evil" and "un-Islamic", a local newspaper reported Monday

The country's head of the Higher Council of Religious Scholars, Sheikh Abdel-Aziz al-Sheikh, told a seminar in Riyadh that it was not permitted to watch Turkish soap operas, according to the Saudi Gazette.

Warning Arab television channels that broadcast them, al-Sheikh said those channels would be perceived as waging a war on God and Islam if they helped to make those soaps more popular.

Those soap are "full of wickedness, evil and moral degradation," he said.