Ilaria De Rosa, a 23-year-old stewardess for the Italian airline Avion Express, was arrested in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on the evening of May 4. Nothing is known about her fate since then. According to Saudi police sources, she was discovered with a joint hidden in her bra. Saudi law makes no distinction between drug possession and drug dealing; the country has no written penal code, and judges issue sentences based on their interpretation of sharia, Islamic law. Drug dealing, which in Saudi Arabia also equates to possessing a small amount, is severely punished: the sentence can even include the death penalty. However, because Ilaria De Rosa is a foreign citizen for whom the Italian Foreign Ministry has already intervened with local authorities, this is highly unlikely. The situation, however, remains complicated and delicate. According to the family, it is highly unlikely that the girl was in actual possession of illegal substances. Marisa Boin, the mother, told La Stampa that her daughter has never used drugs and that she "knows that in countries like Arabia, being found with drugs on you is a huge risk." According to the family's theory, some of the attendees at a party to which the woman had been invited had some sort of narcotic substance on them, and as a result, De Rosa got in the way.
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