Twitter Spy Trial Keeps Jury in Dark on Saudi Torture Claims

Joel Rosenblatt
·5 min read

(Bloomberg) -- When Areej Al-Sadhan testified in the trial of a former Twitter Inc. employee who allegedly spied on her brother for Saudi Arabia, there was much to the story she couldn’t say.

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She wasn’t allowed to say that Saudi secret police went on to abduct her brother, Abdulrahman Al-Sadhan, over his social media posts and that the Kingdom sentenced him to 20 years in prison. That he has been tortured with sleep deprivation and electric shocks. That his captors have smashed his fingers and beaten him so severely that he’d been sent to an intensive care unit.

“All of this, based on a satirical Twitter account” her brother had, Areej Al-Sadhan said in an interview about the abuses.

Those details were off limits after a judge said she wasn’t permitted to insinuate that the now former Twitter employee, Ahmad Abouammo, is responsible for violence committed by the Saudi government.

Still, Areej Al-Sadhan’s testimony was a key piece of the US’s weeklong prosecution of Abouammo that demonstrated his ties to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the defacto Saudi ruler who has cracked down on domestic dissent, arresting scores of well-known clerics, businessmen, intellectuals and activists.

Through a top aide to the prince, Abouammo was allegedly bribed in exchange for personal information of Twitter users who used the platform to criticize the Saudi royal family. Prosecutors subpoenaed Areej Al-Sadhan to testify, and are relying on her appearance to illustrate the human cost of Abouammo’s actions.

Whether Areej Al-Sadhan’s 12 minutes on the stand can make that connection is being put to the test by the remainder of the government’s case. Her testimony contrasts with the many hours federal agents have spent parsing records of calls, emails, wire transfers and Twitter data, in what the judge at one point complained was unnecessary and “mind numbing” detail.

The prosecution rested its case Tuesday as federal public defenders representing Abouammo started arguing his defense. Jurors are expected to begin deliberating over the verdict this week.

Abouammo, a US citizen who left Twitter in 2015 to take a job with Amazon.com Inc. in Seattle, has pleaded not guilty to numerous charges, including acting as an illegal foreign agent in the US and obstruction of justice. He faces up to 20 years in prison.

At trial, a prosecutor showed Areej Al-Sadhan an April 2015 document the US says was maintained by the crown prince’s aide, Bader Al-Asaker. It was a list of about 10 Twitter handles, and a thinly-veiled reference to what prosecutors had previously referred to as a “shopping list of Twitter users” that Al-Asaker wanted a Twitter insider to “keep track of.”

One of them was the handle of Omar Abdulaziz, a friend of Washington Post columnist and Kingdom critic Jamal Khashoggi who was dismembered by Saudi agents in 2018. A US intelligence assessment found that MBS likely ordered Khashoggi’s murder; the crown prince has denied any involvement.

While jurors didn’t learn any details about Abdulaziz, a prosecutor asked Areej Al-Sadhan,“Is this account what you would characterize as critical of the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia?”

Al-Sadhan acknowledged it was, and was then asked to identify another name on the list. It was her younger brother, Abdulrahman, whose Twitter account, she testified, contained “satirical criticism of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”

Since her brother’s disappearance, Areej Al-Sadhan has maintained an international campaign trying to push Saudi Arabia to explain where he’s being held and his condition, and to free him. On the witness stand she explained some of what she describes in forums and meetings around the world.

Abdulrahman Al-Sadhan was born in Saudi Arabia and lived between the Kingdom and the US, where he graduated from college, according to his sister. He returned to Riyadh in 2014 to work for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent.

Areej Al-Sadhan testified that she works in the technology sector in the Bay Area, and that she communicated with her brother frequently by phone, text and email. In March 2018, he went dark.

“Since I lost communication with my brother, I tried to phone him, and my family did as well,” she told the jury. “All my phone calls were not going through, all my messages were not going through, which was very unusual.”

Al-Sadhan wasn’t permitted to tell jurors that a Saudi appeals court last year upheld her brother’s 20-year sentence, citing a printout of about 200 pages of tweets “as the basis for his alleged crimes,” she said in the interview.

At least 220 individuals remain imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for speaking against MBS or calling for reform within the Kingdom, the London-based human rights’ advocacy group Grant Liberty said in its 2022 report on Saudi Arabia.

For the first year her brother was imprisoned, Areej Al-Sadhan said, her family remained quiet. As she learned about her brother’s torture from families of other prisoners, she decided she had to speak -- first on Twitter, “where it all started.” He remains detained and deprived of any family calls or visits, she said.

Fighting persistent threats, she explains Abdulrahman Al-Sadhan’s case to government officials around the world, writes op-eds, and has enlisted the help of human rights organizations. “When we were silent, the worst things were happening” to her brother, she said. “Silence is not an answer.”

(Updates with status of trial in eighth paragraph.)

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