Saudi dissident sues Twitter after being jailed

A humanitarian aid worker who used anonymous Twitter The account that mocked Saudi Arabia over its economy has filed a federal racketeering lawsuit against the social media platform, the kingdom and several individuals it accuses of trying to silence critics abroad.

Abdulrahman al-Sadhan, was working for the Red Crescent in Riyadh in 2018 when wearing plain security forces entered the office of the Red Crescent offices in Riyadh. He was taken without explanation.

How the Saudi government linked al-Sadhan to the Twitter account remains a mystery. In April 2021, the anti-terrorism court where he was tried handed down a prison sentence of 20 years for al-Sadhan, followed by a 20-year travel ban. Al-Sadhan appealed the decision.

In 2019, Ahmad Abouammo, a US citizen and former manager of media partnerships for the Middle East region of Twitter, was accused of acting as an agent of Saudi Arabia without registering with the US government. The complaint also alleges that Saudi citizen Ali Alzabarah, who worked as an engineer at Twitter, accessed Twitter’s confidential data about users, their email addresses, phone numbers and IP addresses. , the latter of which is used to determine a user’s location. The third person named in the FBI complaint is Saudi citizen Ahmed Al-Mutairi, who is said to have worked with an unnamed member of the Saudi royal family as an intermediary.

Abouammo was convicted last summer for failing to register as an agent in Saudi Arabia and other charges.

On Tuesday al-Sadhan and his sister Areej al-Sadhan, a dual Saudi-US citizen living in California, sued Twitter Inc. beyond its borders and silence its critics. The lawsuit, which seeks a jury trial, also names as defendants Abouammo, Alzabarah and Al-Mutairi.

The lawsuit alleges that members of the “Saudi Criminal Enterprise” unlawfully surveilled, killed, tortured, disappeared, kidnapped, extorted and threatened alleged dissidents to silence their speech and export the terror, its suppression and control in the United States.

The complaint also alleges that the defendant Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission, based in Fairfax, Virginia, is a tool used by the Saudi government to survey, stalk, and harass Saudi dissidents and students. based in the US that criticizes the kingdom. Alzabarah was a recipient of a SACM scholarship before he worked at Twitter, according to the plaintiffs.

“It shouldn’t be a federal case for a US citizen to protect himself from thieves in Saudi Arabia, but Areej has no other choice. We hope the US courts will give them some measure of justice and protection that is unfortunately not available elsewhere,” Andrea J. Prasow, executive director of the Freedom Initiative, said in a statement.

Prasow filed the lawsuit in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The Freedom Initiative is a nonprofit organization based in Washington DC dedicated to advocating for prisoners wrongfully detained in the Middle East and North Africa.

Twitter’s public relations office was dismantled by Elon Musk after he acquired the company last year. A request for comment from the company was responded to in an email with a poop emoji.



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