Manama: Saudi authorities have launched an investigation into a video clip showing a child telling his father he would join terror group Daesh and kill him because he was a policeman.
“The authorities are assessing the authenticity of the clip and whether the father was a policeman in the capital Riyadh as he claimed during the brief conversation with his son,” Fawaz Al Miman, the spokesperson for the Riyadh police, said. “There is no evidence so far that supported the father’s allegations of being a policeman in Riyadh.”
In the clip that went viral on social media, the father was urging parents to be extremely cautious with their sons while using the Internet, arguing that terror groups could use online means to reach and influence them.
The father said he felt shock and horror when his six-year-old son told him he wanted to join Daesh to kill him and then blow himself up in a suicide attack.
Highlighting the claims, the father asked his son as the conversation was being recorded whom he would kill and the son replied in an innocent way he would kill his father for working for the police.
The father claimed his son’s mind was influenced by the Internet pages he often surfed on tablet.
The clip was a shocking reminder of how a nephew earlier this month killed his uncle who worked for the interior ministry and then blew himself up at a police checkpoint near a prison in the Saudi capital Riyadh.
Several social media users have called for punishing the father for either staging the incident for stunt purposes or for failing to raise his child properly.