In a letter of appreciation to the Saudi Red Crescent Association in the Kingdom, detainee Ahmad Al-Darbi said his fellow inmates expressed gratitude for the initiative that facilitated visual contact between them and their relatives.
Only 10 out of a previous total of 129 Saudi detainees now remain at the US prison camp in Cuba, Al-Madinah daily reported, quoting a representative of the detainees' families, Abdullah Al-Jaid, as saying. The rest have all been released.
Al-Darbi in his handwritten letter of which Arab News received a copy, lauded the efforts of the Red Crescent, which initiated this program in 2009.
The project of connecting detainees and prisoners with their families was adopted by the SRC in 2008 in coordination with the International Committee of the Red Cross. It was inaugurated in Guantanamo in coordination with the prison’s authorities.
In 2009 video calling was approved and 47 such calls between Saudi detainees and their families were facilitated through Skype the following year.
Al-Darbi extends in his letter his gratitude to workers and officials at SRC for their initiative and the means they provided for detainees to enable them to communicate with their families. He also expressed his and fellow detainees’ appreciation for the cooperation between SRC and Red Cross representatives.
According to a Red Crescent source, SRC under Prince Faisal bin Abdullah pays great attention to the humanitarian side of its services in addition to caring for the wounded and the injured who are transferred to safer areas or to places which can deliver key services.
“The emphasis on humanitarian and social services surpasses citizens inside the Kingdom to those who are abroad such as the detainees and prisoners, who are supervised personally by the prince,” said the source.
The SRC’s visual communication project is but one humanitarian step to serve Saudis aboard, the source pointed out, and this will be followed by other initiatives that will be revealed in time in line with the SRC motto, which is serving people “further and beyond.”
