Saudi Court Convicts a Yemeni Journalist with Apostasy

November 10, 2021
Washington DC – A Saudi court has sentenced a Yemeni journalist to 15 years for tweets promoting apostasy, court records show.
The court in Najran, a city in the southern part of the kingdom, has sentenced journalist Ali Abu Lahoom, to 15 years after linking him to Twitter accounts that criticized Islam and religious beliefs, according to the court decree obtained by IGA.

The decree said Abu Lahoom was arrested by the Saudi State Security Agency on August 23, 2021, after he was linked to two Twitter accounts promoting apostasy. The sentence was issued October 26 by a court presided over by Judge Abdullah Khalifa AlHassan and assisted by Judges Mohamed Ahmed AlQarni and Mohamed Mutlaq AlShihri.
The case moved through the system unusually fast, especially by Saudi standards, with the whole process concluded in the span of two months from arrest to the sentence. Abu Lahoom was arrested August 23, had his first court appearance on October 3, and the sentence was handed down at his second appearance on October 26.

The judges sentenced Abu Lahoom to a total of 15 years, ten of them for apostasy, and declined the prosecutor Hamad Saleh AlHattlani’s request for the death penalty based on the defendant’s denial of the charges, and his lawyer’s offer to present witnesses of Abu Lahoom attending prayers in the mosque and performing pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca. Arrested and tried in part under the Saudi cyber-crime law of 2007, according to the court decree, he was sentenced to five years for using social media to promote heretical ideas.

The judges said that “reasonable doubt” prevented them from applying the death penalty. They did not allow the defendant to present any witnesses, nor did they answer the defense request for dates of the tweets or to examine the defendant’s phone.

Abu Lahoom worked at The Yemen Times, an English-language news outlet in Yemen’s capital Sanaa, until he left the country amid the Saudi war on the country in 2015. He worked in Saudi Arabia as a graphic designer for a car company. Ali Ibrahim Al Moshki, the chairman of the board of Radio Yemen Times, where Abu Lahoom previously worked, condemned the arrest and called for his immediate release: “We urge all human rights organizations and journalists to help us bring Ali home. He does not deserve this.”

According to Al Mushki, Abu Lahoom participated in the U.S. State Department’s International Visitor Program and spent several weeks in the United States in 2013.
The twitter account in question @HumanHMMB has been suspended by Twitter since September. Twitter has not returned messages by the date this report was published.

On the net:
www.yementimesradio.net