A photo of four Burqa-clad women playing a board game in the premises of Mecca's holy mosque went viral on social media and has sparked online controversy across Saudi Arabia.
Just hours after the photo started doing the rounds of the social media, the Saudi authorities issued a statement.
"At 11 p.m. last Friday, a few of the holy mosque's security officers spotted four women playing a board game called 'Sequence,' inside the premises," Website StepFeed reported, citing, a spokesman for the holy mosque's governing authority, as saying in a statement.
"We then dispatched female officers to the scene and they advised the women not to do such things out of respect to the sanctity of the place. They cooperated with authorities and immediately left the area," the statement added.
StepFeed is an English website, which says on its website that it "is trending in the Arab world."
The image has been successful in garnering thousands of reactions, wrote StepFeed's Mariam Nabbout.
People on the internet, however, had differences of opinion.
While, many people have condemned the attitude of women playing, branding the women's actions "inappropriate." Many have resorted to disagreeing with them.
Earlier in 2015, a photo of the youngsters playing cards inside the Masjid-e-Nabwi, a mosque in Saudi Arabia's Medina, went viral. The security authorities arrested them for this act, according to the reports.
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