Saad Ibrahim Almadi (72), a dual US-Saudi national, is serving a 16-year-sentence for posting tweets that were critical of the Saudi government. He posted the tweets in Florida, but when he went to Saudi Arabia, he was apprehended and convicted of harboring a terrorist ideology and trying to destabilize the kingdom.
From The Guardian:
[P]rosecutors focused on 14 tweets that the American published over a seven-year period while he was living in Florida, including posts that referenced Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist who was murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018.
In an interview with the Guardian, Almadi's son, Ibrahim, said Saudi agents kidnapped his father from the airport and held him in a hotel while they searched his phone, which contained photographs of caricatures of Saudi officials, such as a cartoon of a bloated and fat Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince.
The Saudi royal family, which recently invested $2 billion in Jared Kushner's business, have a history of arresting and torturing people critical of their policies.
From The Washington Post:
A Saudi court recently sentenced a woman to 45 years in prison for allegedly damaging the country through her social media activity. A Saudi doctoral student at Leeds University in England was sentenced to 34 years for spreading "rumors" and retweeting dissidents, a case that drew international outrage.
Ibrahim says his father was detained over 14 "mild tweets" posted on Twitter over the past seven years, mostly criticizing government policies and alleged corruption. He says his father was not an activist but a private citizen expressing his opinion while in the U.S., where freedom of speech is a constitutional right.
CNN interviewed Almadi's son, Ibrahim Almad, who said his father has been tortured while in prison.
