Human Rights Activist Dies in Saudi Prison after 15 Years Detention

By Staff, Agencies

Rights groups announced that a human rights activist died in the prisons of the Saudi regime after spending 15 years of arbitrary arrest.

Sanad Organization for Human Rights stated that human rights activist Musa Al-Qarni died on Tuesday in the prisons of the Saudi regime, blaming the authorities for his death inside the prison.

Al-Qarni is a Saudi academic who was born in the Jazan region and obtained a doctorate degree in the field of jurisprudence from the Islamic University. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

He was referred to retirement by a royal decree. Then he worked as a lawyer. In 2007, nine people met in the lounge of lawyer Issam Basrawi to discuss the project of establishing a human rights association concerned with spreading human rights awareness which they called the Peaceful Public National Assembly.

The meeting was to write a political reform document that would be elevated to the king. The security authorities raided the office, and all nine people were arrested, in addition to the tenth, Hassan Al-Hussein Al-Sadiq, a Moroccan national.

The Saudi authorities claimed that a secret organization in Jeddah, west of the Kingdom, was discovered during the investigations, with the aim of “spreading chaos and gaining power with the help of outside parties.”

The Public Prosecution Authority in Saudi Arabia charged the detainees with 75 charges, and claimed that most of them were involved in establishing the secret organization that aimed to seize power in the country.

In August 2010, the trials began after the defendants were transferred from Al-Hair Prison in Riyadh to Dhahban Prison in the city of Jeddah. The trials lasted for a full year for several sessions that exceeded forty sessions.

On the initiative of the lawyer, the request for the release of the accused was raised for a long time and the judge issued the request for release, to be implemented for everyone except for some where it was decided to keep them in prison, and that was in May 2011.