The sister of a Saudi citizen who was detained after tweeting criticism of the government filed a lawsuit against Twitter and the government on Tuesday, claiming the two parties colluded to encourage “repression.”
The case, which identified Saudi Arabia’s strong Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as a defendant and sought a jury trial to assess damages, was filed in a US federal court in San Francisco.
Abdulrahman al-Sadhan was employed with the Red Crescent in Riyadh when he was arrested in 2018 and subsequently given a 20-year prison term.
Al-Sadhan, a student in the US, created an anonymous Twitter account through which he criticized the ultra-conservative monarchy and reposted opinions from opponents.
Later, US authorities accused two ex-Twitter workers of espionage for Saudi Arabia. One was found guilty in December, and it’s thought that another fled for the kingdom.
According to the complaint, the agents sent private Twitter information 30,892 times.
Areej al-Sadhan, a US citizen who is the sister of Al-Sadhan, said in the complaint that she discovered that secret police “broke Plaintiff Abdulrahmam’s hand and smashed his fingers, taunting him that ‘this is the hand you write and tweet with.'”
According to the complaint, “the secret police also subjected Plaintiff Abdulrahman to electric shock torture, flogging, hanging from his feet, suspension in contorted positions, sleep deprivation, threats of beheading, insults, and years of solitary confinement.”
The complaint accused Twitter and Saudi Arabia of racketeering, a US criminal that includes coordinating illicit behavior for profit that was first used to go after the mafia.
After Twitter CEO Elon Musk, a Saudi investment company was Twitter’s second-largest stakeholder as of late last year, according to the complaint, which also highlighted that a portion of the Saudi stock had been sold to the country’s sovereign wealth fund.
The complaint claimed that Twitter had supported participants in the democratic upheavals of the Arab Spring, in part by permitting anonymous accounts.
“Unfortunately, Defendant Twitter became a participant tool of transnational repression to silence voices of dissent beyond Saudi Arabia’s borders in the United States and abroad, all in an effort to monetize its commercial relationship with Defendant KSA,” the statement read, referring to the monarchy.
Areej al-Sadhan said in the complaint that since her brother’s detention, she has had to be “constantly vigilant” and fears being abducted.
It said, “Plaintiff Areej suffers daily as a target of the Saudi Criminal Enterprise, in what she can only describe as a ‘living nightmare,'”
