A woman has been sentenced to 34 years in prison by a Saudi court for allegedly spreading "rumors", and copying statements from political dissidents, through the internet site Twitter. The woman was a Saudi citizen but had been in the United Kingdom (England) as a doctoral student. Presumably, all the posts she had made on Twitter had been done while she was in the United Kingdom. The court ruling comes amid Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's crackdown on dissent. The sentence is considered "shocking", even by Saudi standards of justice. The woman is Salma al-Shehab, a mother of two and a researcher at Leeds University in Britain. She was detained during a family vacation on January 15, 2021, days before she planned to return to the United Kingdom. According to the woman, she had been held for over 285 days in solitary confinement before her case was even referred to court. Saudi doctoral student gets 34 years in prison for tweets | AP News, Isabel Debre, August 17, 2022
Sorry to say but.......she should have known better. She is lucky to be alive. Saudi Arabia is one of the most radical islamist countries on earth. The mass-executed 81 people on March 12, 2022, and it seems in most cases their crime was protesting while being Shiia muslim (as opposed to Sunni) although their kangaroo courts claimed far more serious charges. If you want to criticize them, make sure you never return there and never visit a Saudi embassy in any country.
Maybe she thought that since she was using Twitter while she was in the U.K., she could not get in trouble in Saudi Arabia. She might have thought Saudi Arabia authorities wouldn't go to the trouble of tracking her. After all, maybe she only used that Twitter account while she was in the U.K. They might have hacked into her computer to investigate who the account belonged to. Probably her real "crime" was writing her comments in Arabic, so that people in Saudi Arabia would be able to read them. A lot of women from Muslim countries who spend some time living in Western countries become accustomed to all the freedom in Western countries and then let their guard down and get in big trouble when they later move back to the Muslim country they originally came from.
