Salma al-Shehab is a Saudi PhD student of dental hygiene at Leeds University. She re-tweeted some messages sent by dissidents who oppose a regime led by the dictator. Mohammed Bin Salman. She was not particularly prominent in the Saudi opposition and decided to return to that country for a family visit.
She was arrested and charged with ‘assisting those who seek to cause public unrest and destabilise civil and national security by following their Twitter accounts’. She initially received a three-year jail sentence for this ‘crime’. But when she appealed it, the sentence was increased to an incredible 34 years.
Salma al-Shehab had 2,597 followers and her Twitter account contained all sorts of messages. She did, however, tweet about the case of Loujain al-Hathloul, a prominent Saudi feminist activist who was previously imprisoned for supporting driving rights for women.
This case exposes the utter brutality and political paranoia of the Saudi regime. Inside the country, Mohammed Bin Saman pretends to be a moderniser. But he maintains a vast security apparatus to spy on and suppress any Saudi who disagrees with his regime – no matter where they live.
He has become more emboldened since the visit of US President Joe Biden. Before being elected, Biden promised to stop arms sales to Saudi Arabia because of its brutal war in Yemen and the murder of the journalist, Jamal Khashoggi. But the war in Ukraine has changed all that. In return for promises of increased oil production, Biden is turning a blind eye to the brutalities of the regime.
So much for the discourse that the West is defending freedom against the authoritarians in China and Russia.
