JEDDAH, 10 May 2003 — A British businessman freed from a Saudi jail after serving part of his sentence for running an illegal drinking den was pardoned as part of a royal amnesty and then swiftly deported, a Saudi security official said in remarks published yesterday.
Gary O’Nions, whose release was announced by the British Foreign Office Thursday, was one of some 7,000 people who benefited from a pardon of prisoners convicted of minor offenses ordered by Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Fahd, the unnamed official told the pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat.
O’Nions, who was jailed for eight years for alcohol-related charges in the Kingdom, did not receive the proscribed 800 lashes and his fine of more than $500,000 was commuted, the Foreign Office said.
Al-Hayat quoted the official as saying O’Nions, 57, had committed “a minor crime compared to the crimes of which other Britons are accused — namely murder, bombing and undermining the security of the Kingdom.”
He asked for a pardon from the king after spending three and a half years in jail out of an eight-year sentence handed down last year, the official said. Six other Westerners have been jailed in Saudi Arabia for bombings allegedly linked to a turf war between rival bootlegging gangs.
“They have confessed to their involvement in planning a series of blasts that took place in the Kingdom during the past two years,” security officials have said.
Three British men — identified as James Patrick Lee, 40, James Christopher Cottle, 51, and Les Walker, 55 — gave detailed confessions on Saudi Television with maps on which they pinpointed the three attacks that left two other Britons and an Egyptian injured. The three said they had “received orders” to carry out the attacks.
Lee, who was at the time working at a military hospital in Riyadh, said he and Cottle had been recruited in November to carry out the blasts.
According to preliminary judgments, two of the six face possible beheading after they were convicted of planting a car bomb that killed another Briton in November 2000.
The other four are serving 12-year sentences. The official told Al-Hayat that a final decision on the court verdicts was yet to be made by the Supreme Judiciary Council.
