The smashed windscreen of Rabah Al-Quwayi’s car. (AN photos)

JEDDAH, 16 November 2005 — The car of a Hail-based journalist was vandalized yesterday by miscreants who were allegedly angered by his Internet postings.

Rabah Al-Quwayi, a reporter for the Arabic daily Okaz, was about to go to work in the morning when he saw that the window of his car had been broken and a note had been left behind.

The note said: “In the name of God, the Most Gracious and the Most Merciful: This time it is your car but next time it is you. Return to your religion and forsake heresy. This is the last warning.”

“I’ve been receiving threatening SMS messages and verbal attacks for a year now,” Al-Quwayi told Arab News over the phone from Hail. “But this is the first time things have turned physical. I tried to track the numbers through the Saudi Telecom Company (STC) but it always turns out that the numbers are registered to expatriates.”

The reporter was not attacked for anything he had written in Okaz, but rather for his participation in several Internet forums. Al-Quwayi’s liberal points of view upset a number of participants in the forums.

The attack on his car took place the day after Al-Quwayi, also a supervisor at one of the prominent Saudi cultural Internet forums, posted an article on the site. His article commented on the case of Muhammad Al-Harbi, a chemistry teacher who was charged and convicted of mocking religion.

“I wrote that the only logical explanation for Al-Harbi’s case is that he is against terrorism and some religious people seem to support terrorism and so Al-Harbi, by disagreeing with them, is against religion. It is confusing,” Al-Quwayi explained.

Another threat was made on Al-Quwayi’s life last month. The threat was made on the well-known fundamentalist website, Al-Sahat. “They took a sentence that I had written earlier out of context. In a long article I wrote in a discussion of the Holy Qur’an and posted on the Internet, I said that ‘nothing should be taken for granted.’ The fundamentalists then concluded that I did not believe in the Holy Qur’an and so I should be killed.”

When he saw the damage to his car, Al-Quwayi immediately called the police. He said that they arrived quickly and showed great concern. “They examined the car, took fingerprints and even a DNA expert was there to check,” he said.

The police explained to Al-Quwayi that the bad handwriting in the note and the spelling mistakes were done on purpose to confuse and disguise.

Hail police chief Gen. Nasser Al-Nowaisser said that preliminary investigations were under way. He added that the most important thing in such cases is the full cooperation of the defendant as he is the one most aware of his enemies.

Gen. Al-Nowaisser explained that he could not provide any details since the guilty parties involved might take advantage of any information in the media.

Al-Quwayi said that the people responsible for vandalizing his car had tried to provoke him in every possible way: Both with SMS messages and on Internet forums. When they found that he would not stop and that he continued to write on the Internet using his real name, they changed their policy to one of physical attack.

“I’m really afraid of what’s going to happen in the future. When someone dares to come forward and vandalize your car in front of your house which is located on a main road, that sends a dangerous message,” Al-Quwayi said.

According to him, if the offenders are caught, they should be firmly punished in order to send a message to others. “What happened to me is not just a threat to one individual but to the whole of society,” he said.

Al-Quwayi has not contacted the National Society for Human Rights or the Saudi Journalists Association. He said that the police were very cooperative and he did not want to diminish their efforts. He did say, however, that he had once asked the Saudi Journalists Association for help in another situation and that they had been neither helpful nor cooperative.