SHAFAQNA PAKISTAN (Shia News Agency)
Saudi blogger Raef Badawi was flogged in public Friday near a mosque in the Red Sea city of Jeddah, receiving 50 lashes for “desecrating Islam”, witnesses said.
In September, a Saudi court upheld a sentence of 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for Badawi, and he is expected to have 20 weekly whipping sessions until his punishment is complete.
The United States, Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders have denounced the flogging as a horrific form of punishment, and said Badawi was exercising his right to freedom of expression.
Witnesses said that Badawi, 30, was flogged after Juma prayers near Al-Jafali mosque as a crowd of worshippers looked on. Badawi was driven to the site in a police car, and taken out of the vehicle as a government employee read out the charges against him to the crowd.
The blogger was made to stand with his back to onlookers as another man began flogging him, witnesses said, adding that Badawi did not make any sound or cry in pain. The faithful who had emerged from noon prayers watched in silence and were ordered by security forces not to take any pictures on their mobile phones.
On the eve of the flogging, the US slammed it as an “inhumane punishment”. “We are greatly concerned about reports that human rights activist Raef Badawi will start facing the inhumane punishment of 1,000 lashes in addition to serving a 10-year sentence in prison for exercising his rights to freedom of expression and religion,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.
She said the US called on “Saudi authorities to cancel this brutal punishment” and to review his case.
“Although Saudi Arabia condemned yesterday’s cowardly attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, it is now preparing to inflict the most barbaric punishment on a citizen who just used his freedom of expression and information,” Reporters Without Borders program director Lucie Morillon said Thursday.
Badawi, who has been in jail since 2012, is a “prisoner of conscience”, said London-based Amnesty International, demanding his release.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has arrested three Saudi nationals and four Syrians over links to a suicide bombing and gun attack on the kingdom’s border with Iraq, the first ground assault by militants on the frontier in years.
On Monday, militants killed two Saudi border guards and their commanding officer on the frontier with Iraq, the interior ministry said, in an assault one analyst called Islamic State’s first assault on the kingdom.
On Friday, state news agency SPA quoted an interior ministry spokesman as saying three of the four attackers – who were all killed during the raid – were Saudi nationals and described them as members of the “deviant group”, a phrase authorities have used to describe al Qaeda. Security forces also seized weapons including AK47 automatic guns, hand grenades, explosive belts and cash including Iraqi and Syrian bank notes, from the scene where the attack took place. Seven people – three Saudis and four Syrians – have been arrested, he added.
No group claimed responsibility for the assault in a remote desert area next to Iraq’s Anbar province, where the Islamic State militant group is fighting Iraqi army forces backed by Shi’ite Muslim militias, who are close to Riyadh’s foe Iran. The four raiders shot at a border patrol on Monday morning near the city of Arar and when security officers responded, one of the attackers was captured and detonated an explosives belt and was killed.
Another attacker who was shot during an initial exchange of fire near the Suweif border post was also killed as were two other militants as they were trying to escape.
Saudi forces have joined US-led air strikes against Islamic State positions in Syria.
The Islamist movement, which has declared its own caliphate and wants to redraw the map of the Middle East, has called for “lone-wolf” attacks against Saudi security forces, the Shi’ite Muslim minority and foreigners.
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