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Saudi Arabian Government Jails 72-Year-Old US Citizen For 16 years Over 'Critical' Twitter Comments

Victim
October 19, 2022

According to The Washington Post, Almadi’s son claimed that the Saudi government tortured his father while he was imprisoned and alleged that the State Department handled the situation improperly.

 

A 72-year-old American citizen, identified as Saad Ibrahim Almadi has been given a 16-year prison term by the Saudi Arabian government over tweets he wrote while in the US, some of which were critical of the Saudi leadership.

According to The Washington Post, Almadi’s son claimed that the Saudi government tortured his father while he was imprisoned and alleged that the State Department handled the situation improperly.

Many dictatorships detain Americans unjustly. However, although the Biden administration has worked hard to obtain the release of high-profile Americans detained in Russia, Venezuela, and Iran, it has been less vocal and less effective in securing the release of US citizens detained in Saudi Arabia.

Despite the fact that Saudi Arabia is ostensibly a US ally, the Saudi regime under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is treating its US-citizen opponents harsher than ever. The most recent and worst incident involves Saudi American Saad Ibrahim Almadi.

It was gathered that detained Almadi, a project manager from Florida, decided to practise his right to free speech inside the United States.

But last November, when he traveled to Riyadh to visit family, he was detained regarding 14 tweets posted on his account over the previous seven years. One of the cited tweets referenced Jamal Khashoggi, the Post contributing columnist who was murdered by Saudi agents in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Other tweets criticised the Saudi government’s policies and the corruption in the Saudi system.

He was charged with harboring a terrorist ideology, trying to destabilize the kingdom, and funding terrorism. He was also charged with failing to report terrorism, a charge related to tweets Ibrahim sent on a separate account.

On October 3, Almadi was sentenced to 16 years in prison. He also received a 16-year travel ban on top of that. If he serves his whole sentence, he will leave prison at age 87 — and would have to live to 104 before he could return to the United States.

His son said, “I feel empty inside. I feel dead inside. I feel betrayed. He’s not only my father, he’s my best friend. He is everything to me.”

Ibrahim had been working behind the scenes to persuade the US administration to help secure his father's release since his incarceration. But now, furious and desperate, he wants his father's story told to the American people. Almadi was tortured in prison, made to live in poverty, and confined with actual terrorists — all while the Saudi government threatened his family with losing everything if they didn't keep silent.

The State Department told Ibrahim not to speak publicly about the case, but he no longer believes that staying quiet will secure his father’s freedom. And he says that the State Department has handled his father’s case with neglect and incompetence.

Nobody from the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh visited Almadi until May 2022, six months after his arrest. At that meeting, Almadi declined to ask the U.S. government to intervene. Ibrahim said that Saudi jailers threaten to torture prisoners who involve foreign governments in their cases. In a second consular meeting in August, Almadi did ask for the State Department’s assistance in his case. He was then tortured, Ibrahim said.

That same month, Ibrahim came to Washington to press for action on his father’s case. His main ask was that Almadi be designated as a “wrongfully detained” U.S. citizen. That classification would elevate Almadi’s case in the eyes of the U.S. government and move the file from the State Department’s Consular Affairs bureaucracy to the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs (SPEHA), which has a wider variety of tools to secure the release of Americans unjustly detained overseas.

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