A Saudi Arabian woman has been sentenced to jail for 34-years for using Twitter and following activists and dissidents and retweeting their tweets.
According to a report by The Guardian, 34- year old Salma Al Shehab was handed the jail term by the Saudi’s special terrorist court just two weeks after US President Joe Biden paid the country a visit. Human rights had warned that the visit could escalate the country’s crackdown on activists and protestors.
The mother of two, who is a student at Leeds university, had just returned to Saudi Arabia for a holiday when she was ‘cornered’.
Initially, she had been sentenced to 3-years in jail for the “crime of using an internet website to cause public unrest and destabilize civil and national security.”
She appealed on Monday, only for her to land a heftier sentence. She was also banned from traveling for 34 years after the prosecutor asked the judge to put into consideration other crimes she was accused of.
“The new charges include the allegation that Shehab was “assisting those who seek to cause public unrest and destabilize civil and national security by following their Twitter accounts” and by re-tweeting their tweets,” Guardian reported.
There is however a possibility that Shehab might make a fresh appeal.
The report further reveals that Shehab only has a total of 2,597 followers on twitter and 159 on Instagram.
On Twitter, she sometimes retweets tweets of dissidents who have been exiled which called for the release of “Political prisoners in the kingdom.”
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