- According to his son, a 72-year-old American citizen was given a 16-year prison term in Saudi Arabia.
- According to his son, Saad Ibrahim Almadi was detained for his 14 tweets criticizing the Saudi government.
- Almadi, who has dual citizenship in the US and Saudi Arabia, published the tweets while residing in Florida.
A retired Florida project manager was tortured and sentenced to 16 years in prison by Saudi Arabia over tweets in the US criticizing the Saudi government, his son says.
Saad Ibrahim Almadi, 72, holds dual US and Saudi citizenship. He was arrested while visiting family in Saudi Arabia in November and was convicted earlier this month. It also criticized corruption and policy-making, his son said. According to The Post, the retired project manager also released a tweet referring to Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was notoriously killed by his home country agent in 2018, Ibrahim said.
According to his son, Almadi was detained for his 14 tweets from the past seven years, some of which criticized the Saudi government’s policy choices and corruption. According to Ibrahim of The Post, the retired project manager also tweeted about the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was infamously killed by agents of his own nation in 2018.
According to the Associated Press, Vedant Patel, a deputy spokeswoman for the State Department, confirmed on Tuesday that Almadi was being held in Saudi Arabia.
According to the AP, Patel told reporters, “We have constantly and vigorously voiced our concerns regarding the matter at senior levels of the Saudi government, both through channels in Riyadh and Washington, DC, too, and we’ll keep doing it.
According to the source, he added, “We have discussed this with representatives of the Saudi administration as recently as yesterday.
Ibrahim said in a statement to The Guardian that Saudi agents had abducted his father from an airport and were holding him in a hotel while they searched his phone.
Ibrahim told The Guardian that Almadi had felt secure flying to Saudi Arabia for a vacation because of his American citizenship and the strong connections his tribe had there.
According to The Post, Almadi was later found guilty of having a terrorist ideology, attempting to topple the Saudi Arabian government, and aiding and abetting terrorism.
In addition to his imprisonment, he was also handed a 16-year travel ban, which means that if the entirety of his sentence is carried out, he will be 104 years old when he is allowed to return to the US and 87 years old upon his release.
When Ibrahim’s family contacted the US State Department in March, according to the Associated Press, Ibrahim claimed that the Saudi government was torturing his father.
In his interview with the AP, he also claimed that the State Department had handled his father’s case improperly by failing to declare him an “unlawfully detained” American, which would have given Almadi’s case more priority.
A request for a response from the Insider was not immediately answered by the US State Department.
