Gulf | Saudi Arabia
Research lands man and woman in Saudi jail
A Saudi appeals court is due this week to review the case of a biochemist and his female student sentenced to jail and flogging after a lower court ruled their research contact was a front for a telephone affair.
- Reuters
- Published: 00:02 July 7, 2008
Riyadh: A Saudi appeals court is due this week to review the case of a biochemist and his female student sentenced to jail and flogging after a lower court ruled their research contact was a front for a telephone affair.
The man was sentenced to 8 months in prison and 600 lashes and his student to 4 months in prison and 350 lashes last November for establishing a phone relationship that led her to divorce her husband.
London-based Amnesty International says it will consider the two as prisoners of conscience if the verdicts are carried out.
"The charges ... do not correspond to recognisable criminal offences," the group said in a statement in April.
A spokesman for the government's Human Rights Commission said he was not immediately able to comment.
The hospital where the man worked in Al Baha in the southwest of the kingdom put him in charge of the masters research the student was doing at the King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah in 2002.
The woman obtained a divorce seven months after she was married in 2004. Her husband then filed a case in a court, saying the supervisor's telephone calls had led to the break-up of their marriage.
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