JEDDAH, 19 May 2005 — Deputy Interior Minister Prince Ahmed yesterday rejected allegations made by three Britons that they had been tortured at a Riyadh jail and said they should have been thankful for receiving pardon for the crimes they had committed.
“They have never been tortured. They had lawyers and the representatives of their embassies used to visit them and their families. If there were anything of that sort, their countries would have protested and it never happened,” the prince said when asked about the torture allegation.
“The Shariah court had issued a strong verdict against them as they deserved it for their crimes,” he pointed out.
Prince Ahmed said the Kingdom was not officially informed about the move by Bindman and Partners, a London-based law firm, which represents Britons Sandy Mitchell, Les Walker and William Sampson, to seize the Kingdom’s assets in Britain to pay for overdue legal costs.
Tamsin Allen of Bindman and Partners, said her firm would “start the process” this week of seizing some Britain-based Saudi state assets. She claimed that her clients had won a landmark case in which Britain’s appeals court effectively removed blanket immunity for officials from foreign states accused of serious crimes, for example, torture.
The men were held in Saudi jails for more than two years and confessed, allegedly after torture, to plotting a series of bomb attacks in Riyadh in 2000 and 2001. Saudi authorities described the bombings, in which one Briton was killed, as part of a turf war between Western gangs supplying illegal liquor to expatriates.
The appeals court ruled that the men, along with a fourth Briton jailed by the Saudis, could sue individuals. Allen also claimed that the court ordered Riyadh to pay for the legal costs of its appeal to that decision, believed to be more than 100,000 pounds ($180,000).
But the Saudi Embassy in London said the Court of Appeal Judges had resoundingly rejected the application by Bindman and Partners on behalf of their clients concerning a technical question about legal costs.
“We believe the article in Tuesday’s Guardian newspaper misrepresents the Court of Appeal hearing,” the embassy said. “Once we have received the transcript of the court hearing we will be taking advice as to whether there has been a clear breach of the industry’s Code of Practice (Clause 1 - Accuracy), administered by the Press Complaints Commission,” the embassy said in a statement.
“Lawyers for the claimants had not taken steps to enforce the order from last year and the amount had not even been decided until March 31 this year. It is the intention of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to comply fully with the Court of Appeal,” it added.
The embassy also said Saudi Arabia would take the matter to Britain’s highest court of appeal. “It remains the intention of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to take the underlying case to the House of Lords where it will be heard on April 26, 2006,” it said.
