A court in Saudi Arabia has sentenced the brother of an exiled dissident to death and convicted him of disloyalty to the kingdom’s rulers in a case built around anonymous social media accounts in which 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 being arrested last year and charged with treason. One of the main social media accounts cited in his lawsuit, on platform X — formerly known as Twitter — has eight followers.
The verdict, handed down in July, was also based on a confession attributed to Mr al-Ghamdi following his arrest, in which he said he viewed the king and crown prince as “tyrants” and “agents of the West” who fought against Islam, according to court documents reviewed by DailyExpertNews.
A possible explanation for his persecution was offered by his older brother, Saeed bin Nasser al-Ghamdi, a conservative Muslim cleric and outspoken dissident living in exile in Britain. He said authorities seemed to be using his younger brother to punish him.
“Nobody knew about the messages my brother wrote, and they didn’t spread – nobody even saw them,” Saeed al-Ghamdi told The Times on Friday. “It seems they wanted to hurt or harm me or try to disrupt me with this matter.”
The case is part of the crackdown on dissent that has deepened under 38-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of the kingdom.
For the past eight years, the prince has made the once ultra-conservative country virtually unrecognizable, overseeing a plan to diversify its oil-dependent economy and end a slew of religious and social restrictions that many Saudis found suffocating. At the same time, the modest space for political discourse has narrowed.
Since 2017, Saudi authorities have arrested hundreds of critics from across the political spectrum, including religious clerics, Snapchat influencers, billionaires and several of the prince’s cousins. The 2018 murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents in Istanbul, which sparked international outrage, was the most brutal example of this pressure. Khashoggi, a former Saudi government insider, had fled the country and become an outspoken critic.
In recent years, citizens who criticize their government have been punished more harshly than ever, even though the suspects have become less prominent.
Following his arrest, the younger lord al-Ghamdi confessed to harboring religious and political beliefs that, according to court documents, were portrayed by prosecutors as grave violations of the kingdom’s broadly worded anti-terrorism law. In the confession attributed to him after his arrest, he acknowledged that he was behind the anonymous social media accounts in question.
His attorney denied the allegations, saying his client “loved and was loyal to the nation,” the court documents said. The attorney argued that his client had neurological and psychiatric conditions that should invalidate any statements attributed to him.
Despite this, a panel of judges sentenced Mr al-Ghamdi to death, according to a copy of the verdict. It is possible to appeal against the verdict.
The Saudi government’s Center for International Communication, which handles inquiries from the international news media, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But Saudi officials have argued an iron fist is needed to maintain control as Prince Mohammed oversees major changes, such as dismantling rules linking women to male guardians. In a 2018 interview, Prince Mohammed called the arrests a “small price to pay” to “eliminate extremism and terrorism without civil war.”
Many of the religious figures imprisoned by Saudi authorities share views similar to the elderly Mr al-Ghamdi, who has criticized corruption and political repression while speaking out against elements of social change, including efforts to rewrite the Islamic studies curriculum in schools to remove content the government labeled as extremist.
Recently he has denounced a performance in Riyadh by Iggy Azalea, the Australian musical artist, in which they accidentally split open her bodysuit while rapping the lyrics “Preaching about Prophets/ it ain’t no one man can stop us/bow down to a goddess”.
“The perversion has reached extremes beyond imagining,” the elder Mr. al-Ghamdi wrote on X.
Many Saudis have celebrated the marginalization of such views under Prince Mohammed — arguing that ultra-conservatives have dominated the country for too long and stifled their personal freedoms. At the same time, many Saudis are expressing concern at the speed of social change and discomfort at what they see as the erosion of their country’s Islamic identity.
The prosecution’s case against the younger Mr al-Ghamdi appeared to be built around anonymous accounts he maintained on X and YouTube and his follow and share posts of prominent Saudi dissidents.
In a handful of original posts, he criticized the Saudi royal family and other Arab leaders, saying they were all “Zionists from within.” In a confession attributed to him by prosecutors, he also expressed support for the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group that has labeled the kingdom a terrorist organization, saying that the king and crown prince were “loyal to the infidels and agents of the Jews.”
The judges convicted him of, among other things, disloyalty to the kingdom’s rulers, “calling into question the piety and justice of the king and crown prince” and “supporting terrorist ideology.”
Saudi officials sometimes argue that when they jail religious conservatives, they are simply fighting the extremism Western critics have long accused the kingdom of.
“When they speak, you tell us they are preaching hate,” said Adel al-Jubeir, a senior minister, in an unusually candid lecture in 2018. “When we put them in prison, you told us, ‘Why did you keep from preaching? You have taken away their freedom of expression.’ It’s a ‘damn if we do, damn if we don’t’ situation.”
Rights groups say the kingdom’s anti-terrorism and anti-cybercrime laws are so broadly worded that they are applied to silence many forms of peaceful dissent. Saudis imprisoned in recent years include left-wing intellectuals, feminist activists and others who simply criticized government policies. The number of executions has also risen sharply under Prince Mohammed, two rights groups wrote in a report this year.
The elder Mr al-Ghamdi said he believed authorities were trying to punish him through his brother’s case.
Under Prince Mohammed, the exiled Saudi opposition – once predominantly Islamist in nature – has become increasingly diverse, empowered and better organized. The state has struggled to silence dissent abroad, sometimes turning to new instruments.
Many exiles say that their relatives at home are not allowed to travel abroad. Others, such as the elder lord al-Ghamdi, say they have been pressured to return to the kingdom, where they fear they will soon be arrested. He urged “all the free people in the world” to try to rescue his brother and other prisoners in Saudi Arabia.
“My brother is unknown. He’s not famous. He used anonymous accounts to write posts, and his followers numbered on two hands,” he said. “But they arrested him and placed him in solitary confinement for nearly four months.”
