Tuesday, October 14, 2008

How I survived chop chop square


I was tortured and sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia. As a westerner, I was eventually released, but others are not so lucky

William Sampson
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday October 14 2008

"In theory I should now be dead. Not from disease or an accident but because of the simple fact that my head was set to be severed from my body with a sharp sword in a public square in Riyadh, the Saudi Arabian capital......

Desperate to pin a nascent anti-government insurgency on squabbling "bootlegger" foreigners (anything rather than concede that ultra-safe Saudi Arabia had an internal terrorism problem), we were to be the sacrificial lambs. Remember those bizarre, wooden "confessions", haltingly delivered by scared looking men on national Saudi television? One of those came from me. If I looked petrified it may have been because I'd been dragged to prison, threatened, sleep-deprived and beaten so severely that I almost died from heart attacks......"

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