A court in Saudi Arabia has sentenced to death the brother of an exiled dissident, convicting him of disloyalty to the kingdom’s rulers in a case built around anonymous social media accounts where he shared criticism of the government.
The defendant, Mohammed bin Nasser al-Ghamdi, a 54-year-old retired teacher, had almost no public profile before he was arrested last year and accused of treason.
One of the main social media accounts cited in his court case, on the platform X — formerly known as Twitter — has nine followers.
The sentence, which was handed down in July, was also based on a confession attributed to Mr. al-Ghamdi after his arrest, in which he said he viewed the king and crown prince as “tyrants” and “agents of the West” who were fighting against Islam, according to court documents reviewed by The New York Times.
One possible explanation for his prosecution was offered by his elder brother, Saeed bin Nasser al-Ghamdi, a conservative Muslim cleric and vocal dissident who lives in exile in Britain.
He said the authorities seemed to be using his younger brother to punish him.
“The posts that my brother wrote, no one knew about, and they didn’t spread — no one saw them even,” Saeed al-Ghamdi told The Times on Friday.
“It appears to me they wanted to spite or harm or try to disturb me with this case.”The case is part of a crackdown on dissent that has deepened under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, 38, the kingdom’s de facto ruler.
Over the past eight years, the prince has rendered the once-ultraconservative country nearly unrecognizable, overseeing a plan to diversify its oil-dependent economy and ending a slew of religious and social restrictions that many Saudis found suffocating.
At the same time, the modest space for political discourse has contracted.
Since 2017, the Saudi authorities have arrested hundreds of critics across the political spectrum, including religious clerics, Snapchat influencers, billionaires and several of the prince’s own cousins.
The murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents in Istanbul in 2018 sparked international outrage, an incredible example of such work.
Khashoggi, a former Saudi government employee, fled the country and became a critic.
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