A man has reportedly been sentenced to ten years in jail in Saudi Arabia over a social media Tweet from an account with only 37 followers.
Ahmed al-Doush, a senior business analyst working for Bank of America and originally from Manchester, was arrested on August 31, 2024, while preparing to return to the U.K. after a family vacation.
Saudi security officials detained him at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh as he was getting ready to board a flight.
According to reports, his wife, Amaher Nour, was informed by a government-appointed lawyer that Ahmed had been convicted, but the exact charge was not disclosed to her.
She recalled to the mirror : “He called me from security and told me to fly with the children on to Turkey, our transit stop, and said, ‘I’ll be with you shortly.’”
She later added: “The night times are the hardest for me when I’m alone and it’s quiet. I keep asking myself why, why, why has this happened… he has no political associations.”
Human rights organization Amnesty International revealed that five months after the arrest, Ahmed was accused of spreading ‘fake, untrue and damaging news’ via social media and of having ties with a person considered a threat to Saudi national security.
In the weeks following his arrest, Ahmed was denied access to legal counsel and held without formal charges.
Amnesty reports that he was subjected to extensive interrogations without a lawyer and had no contact with his family for two months.
Even now, his communication with both his relatives and his U.K. legal team remains limited.
The U.K. Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, reportedly discussed the case with his Saudi counterpart, Prince Faisal bin Farhan bin Abdullah, but no specifics were released.
A Foreign Office representative responded to advocacy group Reprieve’s inquiries, stating that while the U.K. government was aware of the situation, it ‘cannot interfere in another country’s legal processes and must respect their systems.’
Amnesty International’s U.K. chief executive, Sacha Deshmukh, denounced the punishment as unjust, saying: “We strongly condemn this sentence and reiterate our urgent call on the Saudi authorities to immediately and unconditionally release Ahmed al-Doush, if he is being held solely for peacefully exercising his human rights.”
Jeed Basyouni, head of the Middle East and North Africa death penalty project at Reprieve, told press: “When a British national is convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison, and neither his family nor his lawyer nor the Foreign Office know what crime he has been accused of, something has gone very badly wrong.”
Ahmed’s family believes the first charge may relate to a now-deleted tweet he posted in 2018 about the conflict in Sudan, which did not reference Saudi Arabia.
The second charge is thought to be linked to his alleged acquaintance with the son of a Saudi dissident, although they insist there was no deeper relationship.
