Saudi court orders man be paralysed

Amnesty International has condemned a reported Saudi Arabian court ruling that a young man should be paralysed as punishment for a crime he committed 10 years ago which led to the victim being confined to a wheelchair.

The London-based human rights group said Ali al-Khawaher, 24, was reported to have spent 10 years in jail waiting to be paralysed surgically unless his family pays one million Saudi riyals (€210,000) to the victim.

The Saudi Gazette newspaper reported last week that Khawaher had stabbed a childhood friend in the spine during a dispute a decade ago, paralysing him from the waist down.

Saudi Arabia applies Islamic sharia law, which allows eye-for-an-eye punishment for crimes but allows victims to pardon convicts in exchange for so-called blood money.

“Paralysing someone as punishment for a crime would be torture,” Ann Harrison, Amnesty’s Middle East and North Africa deputy director, said. “That such a punishment might be implemented is utterly shocking, even in a context where flogging is frequently imposed as a punishment for some offences, as happens in Saudi Arabia.”

A government-approved Saudi human rights group did not respond to requests for comment.

The Arabic-language al-Hayat daily quoted Khawaher’s 60-year-old mother as saying her son was a juvenile aged 14 at the time of the offence. She said the victim had demanded 2m riyals to pardon her son and later reduced this to 1m.

“But we don’t have even a tenth of this,” she said.

Al-Hayat said that an unnamed philanthropist was trying to raise funds to pay the blood money.