On Tuesday, December 28, 2021, a Saudi court has convicted a number of Palestinian and Jordanian detainees who were previously acquitted.
The Saudi Court of Appeals has reduced the imprisoned Palestinian academic Mohamed Al-Khudari’s prison sentence from 15 to six years, three years of them being suspended.
Thus, Mohamed Al-Khudari is scheduled to be released after one month, as he already spent almost three years behind Saudi bars.
However, the court has overturned the acquittal of other Jordanian and Palestinian detainees.
The court sessions will be continued over the next few days to reconsider the remaining prisoners’ prison sentences.
It is worth noting that the Saudi authorities had carried out a campaign of arrests in February of last year that included more than 60 Jordanians and Palestinians working in Saudi Arabia for dozens of years before turning them to trial on charges of supporting the Palestinian resistance, a charge strongly denied by the detainees.
The detainees were brought to court in a mass trial marred by serious violations of legal procedures.
Detainees included the academic Dr. Mohamed Al-Khudari, 83, who was arbitrarily arrested by the Saudi authorities along with his son, Dr. Hani Al-Khudari on April 4, 2019.
In his detention in Riyadh, Al-Khudari is being deprived of the health care he needs due to having prostate cancer, while the prison authorities have not allowed him to consult a specialised doctor for more than a year. This had led to the deterioration of his condition, causing him the inability to move his right arm due to the harsh sleeping conditions in his cell. He also lost half of his hearing, and he suffers from severe pain in the teeth, loss of some of them, difficulty eating, urinary incontinence, herniated disc, knee pain, and osteoporosis, and general fragility.
On October 14, Arab Organisation for Human Rights in the UK held an online seminar in which legal and human rights advocates demanded the release of Al-Khudari.
