Saudi authorities detained and sentenced a university professor to 30 years in prison for critical tweets regarding the House of Saud, its propaganda strategies, and the kingdom’s security situation.
Saudi journalist Turki al-Shalhoub, who previously sparked public outrage by exposing Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s controversial plans against highly revered sites in the country, tweeted on Tuesday that the State Security Court had ruled against Muhammad bin Mohsin al-Basra, a professor at Umm al-Qura University’s media faculty in Mecca.
Shalhoub referenced a series of Tweets from Basra in which he slammed the Saudi-owned and Dubai-based al-Arabiya television news network’s disinformation campaign, Qatar’s three-year-old diplomatic crisis with Saudi Arabia and three other Arab countries, and the country’s security situation.
“Saudi security forces only intervene when the sovereignty of the House of Saud is threatened; otherwise they would not take any serious actions,” the journalist commented.
Prisoners of Conscience, an independent non-governmental organization advocating human rights in Saudi Arabia, reported last month that state officials had detained pro-democracy campaigner Fadi Ibrahim Nasser over tweets criticizing the Saudi government and the Al Saud regime’s policies regarding joblessness among Saudi citizens.
Earlier that month, human rights organizations reported that a Saudi activist had been sentenced to ten years in prison for tweeting anti-government messages.
According to Prisoners of Conscience, the so-called Specialized Criminal Court in the Saudi capital city of Riyadh issued the conviction against Abdullah Gailan on November 15, along with a 10-year travel ban.
Hundreds of Saudi activists, bloggers, academics, and others have been jailed since bin Salman assumed de facto leadership of the country in 2017.
Even in the face of international condemnation of the coercive tactics, the forceful crackdown is an evident indicator of nearly zero tolerance for dissent.
Riyadh has also modified its anti-terrorism laws in recent years to focus on activism.
