RIYADH (Dispatches) – A human rights organization says Saudi authorities are deliberately depriving an imprisoned senior official from the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, of necessary medication, despite the fact that his health has been worsening ever since he was arrested in the kingdom nearly three years ago.
The Arab Organization for Human Rights in the United Kingdom (AOHRUK) stated that Muhammad al-Khudari is denied of the highly needed health care because Saudi officials have stopped injecting him with special injections that he must receive once every three months for his tumor.
AOHRUK said that the Riyadh regime has repeatedly denied al-Khudari’s release on medical grounds, and have refused to set him free even though he completed his prison sentence last month.
The rights group highlighted that the senior Hamas official has been ill-treated since the first day of his detention, verbally abused by interrogators, and mistreated by security forces inside the detention center he is being kept.
His family said he has lost half of his hearing, suffers from osteoporosis, and his teeth were in a poor condition that have left him with constant and severe pain. He also suffers from a malignant prostate tumor, and has recently contracted hepatitis.
AOHRUK called on Saudi officials to release Khudari and other Palestinian and Jordanian detainees as soon as possible.
Khudari and his son Hani were arbitrarily arrested on April 4, 2019 and remained in detention without charge until March 8 last year.
Both men were forcibly disappeared for one month after their arrest, and held incommunicado and in solitary confinement for the next two months of their detention.
A month into the senior Hamas official’s detention, his wife received a phone call from authorities in the maximum-security Dhahban Prison near the Red Sea port city of Jeddah requesting his medical records. Two weeks prior to his arrest, Khudari had undergone surgery.
Khudari is currently being held in al-Hai’r Prison in Riyadh, while his son is detained in Dhahban Prison.