DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — A outstanding Saudi journalist who was arrested in 2018 and convicted on terrorism and treason charges has been executed, the dominion mentioned. Activist teams preserve that the fees towards him have been trumped up.
Turki Al-Jasser, who was in his late 40s, was put to dying on Saturday, in line with the official Saudi Press Company, after the dying penalty was upheld by the nation’s high court docket.
Authorities had raided Al-Jasser’s dwelling in 2018, arresting him and seizing his pc and telephones. It was not clear the place his trial happened or how lengthy it lasted.
In keeping with the New York-based Committee to Shield Journalists, Saudi authorities maintained that Al-Jasser was behind a social media account on X, previously Twitter, that levied corruption allegations towards Saudi royals. Al-Jasser was additionally mentioned to have posted a number of controversial tweets about militants and militant teams.
CPJ’s program director Carlos Martínez de la Serna condemned the execution and mentioned the shortage of accountability within the wake of the killing of Washington Submit columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018 permits for continued persecution of journalists within the kingdom.
“The worldwide neighborhood’s failure to ship justice for Jamal Khashoggi didn’t simply betray one journalist,” he mentioned, including it had “emboldened de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to proceed his persecution of the press.”
Al-Jasser’s “execution as soon as once more demonstrates that in Saudi Arabia, the punishment for criticizing or questioning Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is dying,” mentioned Jeed Basyouni, head of the Center East and North Africa part at Reprieve, a global anti-death penalty advocacy group.
Basyouni added that Al-Jasser was tried and convicted “in whole secrecy for the ‘crime’ of journalism.”
A Saudi assassination team killed Khashoggi on the consulate in Istanbul. The U.S. intelligence neighborhood concluded that the Saudi crown prince ordered the operation however the kingdom insists the prince was not concerned within the killing.
Al-Jasser ran a private weblog from 2013 to 2015 and was well-known for his articles on the Arab Spring actions that shook the Center East in 2011, ladies’s rights and corruption.
Saudi Arabia has drawn criticism from human rights teams for its numbers and likewise strategies of capital punishment, together with beheadings and mass executions. In 2024, executions in Saudi Arabia rose to 330, in line with activists and human rights teams, as the dominion continues to tightly clamp down on dissent.
Final month, a British Financial institution of America analyst was sentenced to a decade in jail in Saudi Arabia, apparently over a since-deleted social media put up, in line with his lawyer.
And in 2021, a twin Saudi American nationwide, Saad Almadi, was arrested and later sentenced to more than 19 years in jail on terrorism-related fees stemming from tweets he had posted whereas residing in america. He was launched in 2023 however has been banned from leaving the dominion.