Lebanese pilgrim, arrested and convicted in Saudi Arabia on sorcery charges for his role in a TV show, due to be executed on Thursday
By Robert Fisk
(Left: video still of a beheading on "chop chop square" in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia)
"Some stories from the Middle East make you want to weep. But this one is truly heart-breaking.
The moment came when little Jamal walked back from school and climbed on the sofa beside me in her plaited hair and said – unprompted by any of her family – "Are you going to bring my Daddy home?" Alas, I could not tell a four-year-old of the powerlessness of journalists, nor that her father, a pious, poor Shia Muslim, may be executed in Saudi Arabia on Thursday – for witchcraft.
The story is almost too awful to relate because it should be untrue. But it is a fact that Ali Sbatt set off with members of his family two years ago to join the haj in Mecca. After 15 days, the morality police broke into his hotel room and charged him with sorcery. And the reason turns out to be that Ali, a truck driver, once worked for a now-defunct Lebanese television channel called Sheherezade and predicted happy news or gave encouragement to callers with personal problems.
How the Saudi police should have decided on his arrest when Mr Sbatt was making the haj – his eldest son Hussein was with him and showed me his father's portrait in his white pilgrimage robes, taken just before his imprisonment – is unclear. Shias in largely Sunni Saudi Arabia have been treated with suspicion since the Iranian revolution, and Mr Sbatt had an Iranian visa in his passport. Yet millions of Iranians make the pilgrimage to Mecca without being arrested.....
The family fears that Mr Sbatt was tortured after his arrest – he had no lawyers when he was sentenced – and Saudi courts, which routinely sentence alleged drug-dealers to beheadings, according to Amnesty International, do not meet international standards of fairness...... "
By Robert Fisk
(Left: video still of a beheading on "chop chop square" in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia)
"Some stories from the Middle East make you want to weep. But this one is truly heart-breaking.
The moment came when little Jamal walked back from school and climbed on the sofa beside me in her plaited hair and said – unprompted by any of her family – "Are you going to bring my Daddy home?" Alas, I could not tell a four-year-old of the powerlessness of journalists, nor that her father, a pious, poor Shia Muslim, may be executed in Saudi Arabia on Thursday – for witchcraft.
The story is almost too awful to relate because it should be untrue. But it is a fact that Ali Sbatt set off with members of his family two years ago to join the haj in Mecca. After 15 days, the morality police broke into his hotel room and charged him with sorcery. And the reason turns out to be that Ali, a truck driver, once worked for a now-defunct Lebanese television channel called Sheherezade and predicted happy news or gave encouragement to callers with personal problems.
How the Saudi police should have decided on his arrest when Mr Sbatt was making the haj – his eldest son Hussein was with him and showed me his father's portrait in his white pilgrimage robes, taken just before his imprisonment – is unclear. Shias in largely Sunni Saudi Arabia have been treated with suspicion since the Iranian revolution, and Mr Sbatt had an Iranian visa in his passport. Yet millions of Iranians make the pilgrimage to Mecca without being arrested.....
The family fears that Mr Sbatt was tortured after his arrest – he had no lawyers when he was sentenced – and Saudi courts, which routinely sentence alleged drug-dealers to beheadings, according to Amnesty International, do not meet international standards of fairness...... "
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