A court in Saudi Arabia has sentenced the brother of an exiled dissident to death, convicting him of disloyalty to the kingdom’s leaders in a case built on anonymous social media accounts where he shared criticism of the government.
The defendant, Mohammed bin Nasser al-Ghamdi, a 54-year-old retired teacher, had almost no public profile before he was arrested last year and accused of treason. One of the main social media accounts cited in his court case, on platform X — formerly known as Twitter — has eight followers.
The sentence, handed down in July, was also based on a confession attributed to Mr. al-Ghamdi after his arrest, in which he said he viewed the king and crown prince as “tyrants” and ” agents of the West” who were fighting Islam, according to court documents reviewed by The New York Times.
One possible explanation for his prosecution was offered by his older brother, Saeed bin Nasser al-Ghamdi, a conservative Muslim cleric and vocal dissident living in exile in Britain. He said it seems the authorities are using his younger brother to punish him.
“The posts my brother wrote, no one knew, and they didn’t spread – no one saw them,” Saeed al-Ghamdi told The Times on Friday. “It looks like they want to hurt or harm or try to bother me in this case.”
The case is part of a crackdown on dissent that has deepened under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, 38, the kingdom’s de facto ruler.
Over the past eight years, the prince has made the once ultraconservative country almost unrecognizable, overseeing a plan to diversify its oil-dependent economy and ending many of the religious and social restrictions that many Saudis find which is sad. At the same time, the little space for political discourse contracted.
Since 2017, Saudi authorities have arrested hundreds of political critics, including religious clerics, Snapchat influencers, billionaires and some of the prince’s cousins. The 2018 killing of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist, by Saudi agents in Istanbul, which sparked international outrage, is the most brazen example of pushback. A former Saudi government insider, Mr. Khashoggi fled the country and became an outspoken critic.
In recent years, harsher penalties have been meted out to citizens who criticize their government, though the accused have become less well-known.
After being imprisoned, the younger Mr. al-Ghamdi admitted to holding religious and political beliefs that prosecutors described as serious violations of the kingdom’s broadly worded anti-terrorism laws, according to court documents. In a confession attributed to him after his arrest, he acknowledged that he was behind the anonymous social media accounts in question.
His attorney denied the charges and said his client was “loved and loyal to this country,” according to court documents. The lawyer argued that his client has neurological and psychiatric conditions that should invalidate any statements attributed to him.
Despite this, a panel of judges convicted Mr. al-Ghamdi of death, according to a copy of the decision. The verdict is open for appeal.
The Saudi government’s Center for International Communications, which handles inquiries from international news media, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But Saudi officials have argued that an iron hand is needed to maintain control as Prince Mohammed oversees major changes, such as the removal of rules that included women with male guardians. In a 2018 interviewPrince Mohammed called the arrests a “small price” to “eliminate extremism and terrorism without civil war.”
Many of the religious figures jailed by the Saudi authorities share the same views as the elder Mr. al-Ghamdi, who criticized corruption and political repression while speaking out against elements of social reforms, including efforts to rewrite the curriculum of Islamic studies in schools to remove content designated by the government as extremist.
Recently, he a performance in Riyadh was banned by Iggy Azalea, the Australian musical artist, where she didn’t mean it open her bodysuit while rapping the lyrics “Preaching about prophets/ it ain’t no one man can stop us/ bow down to a goddess.”
“Depravity has reached unimaginable extremes,” wrote the elder Mr. al-Ghamdi in X.
Many Saudis have celebrated the marginalization of such views under Prince Mohammed – arguing that ultraconservatives have dominated the country for too long and stifled their personal freedoms. At the same time, many Saudis have expressed concern about the pace of social change and discomfort with what they view as the erosion of their country’s Islamic identity.
The prosecution case against the younger Mr. al-Ghamdi appears to have been built around the anonymous accounts he maintained on X and YouTube and his following and sharing of posts from prominent Saudi dissidents.
In several original posts, he criticized the Saudi royal family and other Arab leaders, saying they were all “Zionists inside.” In a confession attributed to him by prosecutors, he also indicated support for the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group designated by the kingdom as a terrorist organization, and said the king and crown prince were “loyal to the infidels and agent of the Jews.”
Judges convicted him of charges including treason against the kingdom’s rulers, “challenging the sanctity and justice of the king and crown prince” and “supporting terrorist ideology.”
Saudi officials sometimes argue that when they crack down on religious conservatives, they are only fighting the extremism that Western critics have long accused the kingdom of spreading.
“When they speak, you tell us they are preaching hate,” Adel al-Jubeir, a senior government minister, said in an unusually candid interview in 2018. “When we put them in jail, you will tell us, ‘Why did you stop them from preaching? You took away their freedom of speech.’ It’s a ‘damned if we do, damned if we don’t’ situation.”
Rights groups say the kingdom’s anti-terrorism and anti-cybercrime laws are so broad word that they holding to silence many forms of peaceful dissent. Saudis jailed in recent years include leftist intellectuals, feminist activists and others who have simply criticized government policies. Under Prince Mohammed, the rate of executions also increased dramatically, two groups of rights written in a report this year.
The elder Mr. al-Ghamdi that he believes the authorities are trying to punish him through his brother’s case.
Under Prince Mohammed, Saudi opposition to the exile – once primarily Islamist in orientation – has grown more diverse, vocal and well-organized. The state struggles to silence dissent abroad, sometimes turning to new tools.
Many expatriates say that their family members in their home country are banned from traveling abroad. Others, like the elder Mr. al-Ghamdi, say they face pressure to return to the kingdom, where they fear they will face imminent arrest. He urged “all free people in the world” to try to save his brother and other prisoners in Saudi Arabia.
“My brother is unknown. He is not famous. He used anonymous accounts to write posts, and his followers can be counted on two hands,” he said. “But they arrested him and put him in solitary confinement for about four months.”
