RAFHA, 3 September 2006 — After Fawaz Al-Onaizi got into an argument with a local while on vacation in Syria, the 28-year-old Saudi got a 20-day taste of the country’s prison system, complete with lashings, arbitrary charges, and signing sheets of paper without being allowed to read what had been written on them.
“I still have marks from the hard lashing on my back,” Al-Onaizi told Al-Watan Arabic daily. “They wanted me to confess that I was cursing the Syrian government.”
The young Saudi said that about half an hour after arriving in Damascus for vacation, he got into an argument with a local man in a restaurant.
The Saudi said the Syrian man cursed Saudi Arabia and this led to an argument. The argument ended with the Saudi man and his friends, all in their 20s, leaving the restaurant.
Half an hour later, as the men were getting settled into the apartment they had rented for the summer break, police charged in and arrested Al-Onaizi and his friends Ali, Faisal and Ayed. As the four Saudi men were being taken away, Al-Onaizi said that he saw the man with whom he had argued standing next to one of the police cars.
After that, he said that the men spent 10 days in the local police station being lashed and ordered to confess to sedition.
“When I didn’t confess to these false accusations, I ended up in the central penitentiary in Damascus,” he said. “There, the charges were changed from sedition to solicitation of prostitution. When I was arrested, I had barely been in Syria for an hour.”
Al-Onaizi said that afterward it seemed the police didn’t know what to do with them. There was no investigation, though the men said they were forced to sign papers, but weren’t allowed to read what had been written on them.
The men allegedly stayed in prison for 20 days. Al-Onaizi described the conditions as “terrible” and that they were called “bad names.” He said they were served stale, moldy bread and were forced to drink from the filthy bathrooms.
Al-Onaizi said that he saw about 60 or so other Saudis in the prison.
Eventually, Al-Onaizi said they managed to bribe their way out of prison. When they returned to their apartment, they discovered that everything had been cleared from the room, including their clothes, laptops and mobile phones, never to seen been again by the four men.
