Members of the dreaded Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, known as Mutawas, descended on the shop in the capital’s Al Deira market on Tuesday after the woman entered the shop while there was no one inside except the male owner, the Saudi-owned Al-Hayat daily reported.

“The commission suspected the woman was in “unlawful seclusion’ with the owner despite the fact that the shop’s shutters were wide open,” the paper said, employing a term commonly used in Saudi Arabia’s puritanical society to describe a sexual liaison.

Quoting her nephew, the paper said the woman, who could barely walk, had gone missing after she went shopping.

Her family searched for her in hospitals and police stations all over the capital until they found her in a woman’s prison late Tuesday.

She was later released.

Mutawas, who are attached to the country’s powerful religious establishment, are charged with enforcing the ultra-conservative kingdom’s strict Islamic moral code including the segregation of the sexes in public.

The interior ministry issued a decree on May 25 aimed at reining in the Mutawas by requiring them not to interrogate detained suspects, as they previously did, but to hand them over to police.