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The tweet posted by Saudi journalist Turki al-Jasser in 2014 was chillingly prescient: “The Arab writer can be easily killed by their government under the pretext of ‘national security’,” he wrote.
On Saturday, the Saudi interior ministry announced that al-Jasser had been executed in Riyadh, for crimes including “high treason by communicating with and conspiring against the security of the Kingdom with individuals outside it”.
Al-Jasser is believed to have been in his 40s and the execution – which in most cases in Saudi is carried out by beheading with a sword – followed seven years of detention. Dissidents who spoke to the Guardian alleged he was subjected to torture during his imprisonment.
It was the first high-profile killing of a journalist by the Saudi state since the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist and prominent critic of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman who was lured into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and murdered by Saudi agents. A UN report concluded that the murder was an extrajudicial killing by the state, and an intelligence assessment released by then president Joe Biden in 2020 concluded that bin Salman approved the murder.
But the circumstances around that murder and al-Jasser’s killing, and the international response to it, are markedly different. Most dissidents and experts who followed al-Jasser’s case say he was likely detained by Saudi authorities in 2018 after being identified as the writer behind a popular anonymous Twitter account that accused the Saudi royal family of alleged corruption and human rights abuses.
In public, al-Jasser was the founder of the news blog Al-Mashhad Al-Saudi (The Saudi Scene), which press freedom group Reporters without Borders said regularly addressed topics such as women’s rights and Palestine. But it was the account on what was then known as Twitter (and now as X) that is believed to have riled Saudi authorities and led to his arrest during a broader crackdown on dissent.
“Turki had two Twitter accounts. While he was vocal using his real name, he was even more satirical and vocal with the other account, which was in the crosshairs of the Saudi government,” says Abdullah Alaoudh, senior director for countering authoritarianism at Middle East Democracy Center. “The government assumed his and other anonymous Twitter accounts were part of a coordinated effort and delusional conspiracy to topple the Saudi government.”
The Saudi government gained access to the real identities and IP addresses behind thousands of anonymous Twitter accounts following Saudi agents’ infiltration of the company in 2014-2015. The Department of Justice charged two former Twitter employees and a Saudi national in the plot. Ahmad Abouammo was found guilty by a federal jury of fraud, conspiracy, acting as a foreign agent for bribes, and conveying user information to the kingdom on behalf of the royal family. At the time, assistant attorney general Matthew Olsen of the justice department’s national security division, said the guilty verdict showed the justice department would hold accountable anyone who aids “hostile regimes in extending their reach to our shores”. Two other indicted men fled to Saudi before they could be arrested.
A Twitter spokesperson said in 2021 that it acted swiftly at the time of the incident when it learned there were malicious actors accessing Twitter user data. That view has been challenged by the family of another man who was arrested after the Twitter breach, who believe the social media platform is at least partly responsible for dissidents’ arrests.
Abdulrahman al-Sadhan, a former aide worker, was arrested in 2018 and sentenced three years later to 20 years in prison and a 20-year travel ban. He is alleged to have maintained an anonymous account that mocked the kingdom’s leaders.
“They broke his hand, smashed his fingers, saying this is the hand you tweet with,” Areej al-Sadhan told CBS News in a 2023 interview. “They tortured him with electric shocks, beating and sleep deprivation.”
Reporters without Borders said al-Jasser was the first journalist to be sentenced to death and executed in Saudi under the rule of Mohammed bin Salman, and the second in the world since 2020, when Amadnews director Ruhollah Zam was put to death in Iran.
The state department did not respond to a request for comment.
When the Saudi crown prince was asked by Fox News’s Brett Baier in 2023 about a case in which a Saudi court sentenced a man – Mohammed bin Nasser al-Ghamdi – to death for posts on X and his YouTube activity, bin Salman blamed “laws” in the kingdom and said he was doing his best to “change them”.
“Do we have bad laws? Yes. We are changing that, yes,” he said. Asked whether al-Ghamdi would ultimately be killed bin Salman said: “I’m hoping that in the next phase of trials, the judge there is more experienced, and they might look at it totally different.”
Al-Ghamdi’s death sentence was later commuted.
Legal scholars have pointed out that the crown prince could legally have intervened in al-Jasser’s own execution. Under Saudi law the crown prince or the king must approve every execution.
The Saudi government has been approached for comment.
“With Jasser’s execution, Mohammed bin Salman has once again shown us that he remains a vindictive, thin-skinned tyrant who kills people who criticize him,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Dawn, a pro-democracy group founded by Khashoggi.
“He has weaponized the Saudi judiciary to prosecute and execute a Saudi man under the country’s bogus counter-terrorism law exclusively because of his critical commentary about the country on social media. Western governments are eager to pretend that MBS has morphed into some kind of reputable statesman, but it’s hard to reform a sociopathic autocrat with zero domestic guardrails.”
