Saudi man gets 10 years and 2,000 lashes for atheist tweets
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — A court in Saudi Arabia has sentenced a man to 10 years in prison and 2,000 lashes for expressing his atheism in hundreds of Twitter posts.
Al-Watan online daily said Saturday that religious police in charge of monitoring social networks found more than 600 tweets denying the existence of God, ridiculing Quranic verses, accusing all prophets of lies and saying their teachings fueled hostilities.
You May Also Like
It says the 28-year-old man admitted to being an atheist and refused to repent, saying that what he wrote reflected his own beliefs and that he had the right to express them. The report did not name the man.
The court also fined him 20,000 riyals, about $5,300.
In November 2015, Saudi Arabia also sentenced a Palestinian poet, Ashraf Fayadh, to death after he allegedly renounced the Muslim faith. His death sentence was commuted to eight years in prison and 800 lashes in February 2016, according to Amnesty International.
Saudi Arabia follows a strict interpretation of Islamic law. In 2014, Human Rights Watch criticized the country's new terrorism laws, which appear to criminalize the promulgation of "atheist thought in any form."
"Saudi authorities have never tolerated criticism of their policies, but these recent laws and regulations turn almost any critical expression or independent association into crimes of terrorism," Joe Stork, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.
Additional reporting by Mashable.
Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.
Ariel Bogle was an associate editor with Mashable in Australia covering technology. Previously, Ariel was associate editor at Future Tense in Washington DC, an editorial initiative between Slate and New America.
