Iraqi police arrest male fortune teller for blackmailing woman

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Local police in a small town outside the Iraqi capital announced on Thursday the arrest of a male fortuneteller for attempted blackmail of a woman.

The arrest took place in the Madain, the Interior Ministry said in a statement, located roughly 50 kilometers south of the center of Baghdad. The detainee is charged with "blackmailing" a woman for an undisclosed amount of money in exchange for not publicizing photographs and other evidence in his possession of her visiting the accused's house for "witchcraft and sorcery" services shared online.

"The accused was interrogated and confessed to his crime, as well as having carried out a number of other cases of extortion in which most of his victims were women," the statement added.

Iraq has prosecuted various individuals charged with blackmailing Iraqi females using photographs with regularity in recent years, especially with the ever-growing popular use of social media. Some men in the country, aware of the leverage potentially explicit pictures hold over women, use that fact to exploit them further.

There have been instances where they demanded additional, and sometimes even more graphic photos, increasing the power they hold over their victims. 

Fortune telling and various other alternative supernatural practices are also fairly common in Iraq.

On Wednesday, a controversial Kurdish faith healer appeared in a video decrying his critics and Kurdistan Region media after reports of his arrest in Saudi Arabia for alleged fraudulent activity.

Read More: Controversial Kurdish faith healer appears in video after Saudi arrest

From the small town of Kalak in the outskirts of Erbil, Mala Ali, as he is commonly known, was seen in social media videos on Tuesday, in which he appeared to be carrying out one of his faith healing performances to restore eyesight to a blind man. Shortly after, Saudi Arabia’s police command in the city of Medina said they had arrested an Iraqi national in his 50s who was in the video, "claiming to be able to treat blindness and incurable diseases."

A public figure, Mala Ali has broadcast a multitude of personal videos and has been a guest on many local television shows wherein he has claimed to have the ability to use faith to cure a variety of illnesses, including cancer and HIV.

Editing by John J. Catherine