Saudi retired teacher sentenced to death for criticising ruling family on social media
A Saudi court has sentenced a retired teacher to death for criticising the ruling family in messages to his nine social media followers.
According to Human Rights Watch, 54-year-old Mohammed al-Ghamdi was sentenced to death on July 10 for various offences related to his activity on YouTube and X, formerly known as Twitter. The ruling may be the first death sentence for social media posts.
The charges reportedly levied against the retired teacher include “describing the King or the Crown Prince in a way that undermines religion or justice”, “supporting a terrorist ideology”, and disseminating fake news “with the intention of executing a terrorist crime”.
On Thursday, Mohammed’s brother, Saeed al-Ghamdi, tweeted that his brother’s sentencing may be an attempt “to spite me personally after failed attempts to return me to the country”. Saeed, an Islamic scholar, lives in self-imposed exile in London and is wanted by the Saudi authorities.
“I appeal to anybody who can help to save my brother from this unfair and unjust ruling,” he said.
Saudi Arabia has long faced criticism for its frequent use of the death penalty. In 2022, the kingdom performed 196 confirmed executions, according to Amnesty International, making it the third-most prolific executioner after China and Iran.
‘Silence its critics’
Saudi Arabia has also handed down numerous decades-long sentences for crimes related to social media posts.
Last August, a Leeds University doctoral student was sentenced to 34 years in prison when she returned home to Saudi Arabia for the summer holidays. Salma al-Shehab, a 34-year-old mother of two, was accused of “assisting those who seek to cause public unrest and destabilise civil and national security by following their Twitter accounts”.
Mohammed al-Ghamdi has been held by Saudi security forces since last June when he was arrested outside his house in Mecca. Following his arrest, Human Rights Watch reports that he spent four months in solitary confinement and was denied access to a lawyer for over a year.
His trial was conducted in Saudi Arabia’s controversial Specialized Criminal Court (SCC) that was established in 2008 to deal with a backlog of terrorism cases but has since become notorious for handing heavy sentences to political prisoners.
In 2020, Heba Morayef, Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa director, said: “The Saudi Arabian government exploits the SCC to create a false aura of legality around its abuse of the counter-terror law to silence its critics. Every stage of the SCC’s judicial process is tainted with human rights abuses.”
