Saudi Woman Jailed For Using Twitter To “Challenge” King, Crown Prince
A new Saudi woman was jailed for 45 years was sentenced to use Twitter to “challenge” the king and son of the country’s crown, according to court documents that were seen Tuesday by AFP.Hard punishment for Nourah Al-Qahtani, which was revealed last week and withdrew Swift’s international criticism, was issued less than a month after US President Joe Biden voiced concerns about human rights violations during controversial visits to Saudi Arabia.
Punishment documents were given to AFP by Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), a Washington -based rights group founded by Saudi journalists who were killed by Jamal Khashoggi.AFP cannot verify independently, and Saudi authorities have not responded to requests for comments about this case.
The document illustrates Qahtani as the mother of five children in the age of 40 who suffer from unspecified health problems. He does not have a large public profile and unclear how his anonymous Twitter account, which has less than 600 followers, attracts the attention of Saudi authorities.
The court found that Qahtani had used Twitter “to challenge the religion and justice of” Raja Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a 37 -year -old de facto ruler, according to the document.
He also said he was inciting “their activities that tried to disturb public order and disrupt the security of the community and the stability of the country” by “issuing fake and evil tweets”. Qahtani also uses Twitter to “insult the symbol and state officials” and demand “the release of prisoners who are waiting for security cases,” the document said, without giving further details.
The Qahtani account, as identified in court documents, displays many posts that criticize the government, and the description of the banners including hashtags calling for anti-government protests that coincide with pilgrimage pilgrimage last year. The account is also a postweet of a warning post to arrest them behind public protests, which are not tolerated in Saudi Arabia.
‘Part of a pattern’?
His last post was dated July 2021, the same month Qahtani was detained. The court initially punished him in February to six and a half years in prison, followed by a travel ban for the same amount of time. The prosecution then appealed to a harder sentence, producing a term of 45 years. Prince Mohammed has broken out the expansion of women’s rights under his reign which makes them given the right to drive, while also oversees strong actions against female activists.
Earlier in August, the rights groups published the Salma al-Shahab case, a PhD candidate at the University of Leeds England who was sentenced to 34 years in prison for helping the dissidents who tried to “disturb public order” by retweeting their posts. The Qahtani sentence “is now part of the pattern”, said Abdullah Alaoudh, Dawn Research Director for the Bay area.
“Targeting ordinary people is intended to send a wave of fear to the locals and Saudi people to refrain from criticizing the Saudi government through an anonymous Twitter account.”
