CAIRO (Middle East Eye) – An Egyptian doctor who is a former employee at the Saudi health ministry has been sentenced to 20 years in prison in Saudi Arabia, on charges of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, a rights group said.
According to the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF), the Specialized Criminal Court in Riyadh - which hears cases related to terrorism - handed the sentence to the Egyptian physician, Sabri Massad Ibrahim Shalaby, who has been detained since January 2020.
The evidence brought against Shalaby was a testimony given by a fellow prisoner who alleged that he voted for the late president Mohamed Morsi in the 2012 Egyptian presidential election.
Morsi was a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group outlawed as a “terrorist organization” by Saudi Arabia and Egypt following the coup against Morsi in 2013, led by then-defence minister Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who is now president.
Human Rights Watch criticized Egypt’s designation of the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group in 2013, dismissing it as “politically driven” and “aimed at expanding a crackdown on the Brotherhood’s peaceful activities”.
Shalaby, however, has denied the charges, and rights groups who documented his case have ruled out the possibility of his ability to vote in the 2012 election, given his location at the time.
The ECRF, in a joint statement with the Center for Human Rights, has previously suggested the timing of the arrest was related to a verdict on a lawsuit he filed against the Saudi health ministry to pay him financial dues.
Prior to his arrest, Shalaby worked for the Saudi health ministry from 2006 until the end of 2019, but 10 years after his work, he discovered that he had been registered on the ministry’s system with a job title lower than his actual one.
The doctor filed a lawsuit before a Saudi court in 2017, which lasted for two years. In the end, a verdict was passed in his favor in 2019 and a ruling was issued to settle his salary retroactively since the initiation of the contract.