RIYADH (Middle East Eye) – The son of an elderly U.S. citizen who was sentenced in Saudi Arabia earlier this month to 16 years in prison over tweets he posted criticizing the kingdom has said his father has been tortured in jail.
Ibrahim Almadi, the father of Saudi-American Saad Ibrahim Almadi, 72, told the Washington Post that the U.S. State Department had been both neglectful and negligent over the case.
Ibrahim said no one from the U.S. embassy in Saudi Arabia had visited his father until six months after his arrest in November last year and that no U.S. officials had attended his sentencing despite having notified them of the hearing.
Saad, a project manager from Florida, was detained last year at Riyadh airport when he travelled to Saudi Arabia to visit family.
He was charged with harboring a terrorist ideology, trying to destabilize the kingdom, as well as supporting and funding terrorism over 14 tweets he had posted on his account while in the U.S. over the previous seven years.
One of the tweets made reference to Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist who was murdered by Saudi agents in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018.
Other tweets included criticism of corruption inside the kingdom.
Ibrahim told the U.S. newspaper that the State Department had told him not to speak publicly about his father’s case, but that he no longer believed that staying quiet would secure his father’s freedom.
During the meeting between embassy officials and his father in May, Saad declined to ask Washington to intervene as Saudi jailers threaten to torture prisoners who involve foreign governments in their cases, Ibrahim added.
Saudi Arabia is regularly accused by rights groups over the torture and ill-treatment of prisoners in its jails, something they say has become worse since Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman became de facto ruler of the kingdom in 2015.
Last week, Middle East Eye reported that one of several Saudi Arabian men sentenced to death earlier this month for resisting their tribe’s displacement over the kingdom’s Neom megaproject was tortured in prison.