Recently police in Riyadh were ordered to pay damages to a non-Saudi resident who was detained on multiple occasions without charge, had his passport confiscated and was banned from traveling.
The man was awarded SR33,120 by the Court of Grievances for the pain he suffered after a Saudi citizen filed a case against him in order to evict him from the apartment he lived in with his wife.
According to local newspapers the man had rented an apartment ten years ago from the father of the Saudi who had registered the case. After the death of the owner, his son inherited the building and pressurized the man to vacate the apartment. He used his connections with the police to harass him and even have him arrested on various occasions, once for a nine-month period. The report said that while he was in jail the man’s wife had died.
Exasperated with the situation, the foreigner finally filed a lawsuit demanding SR8 million in compensation for the psychological pain and humiliation suffered while detained. But strangely the courts only awarded the man a meager sum of SR33,120.
I’ve tried to keep the story as short as possible and excluded a lot of the details. It is alarming to find that the Saudi citizen, who had filed the case, had very close connections to the police and that this man’s suffering had nothing to do with breaking the law of the land but rather to do with the Saudi man’s influence over the police.
One thing worthy of note is that at least the Saudi press fairly and honestly published the story highlighting the fact that the man was a victim of a conspiracy hatched by the police and a Saudi citizen.
I’m sure there are many people that suffer similarly but do not come forward and demand compensation. Policemen are human beings and make mistakes when influenced by friends and families. But it would be a total miscarriage of justice for a policeman to ignore his mistakes and fail in reporting them.
