PRISONERS OF CONSCIENCE:This year marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of Amnesty International. To mark this, Amnesty, in association with The Irish Times, is profiling a prisoner each month . . .
ON JUNE 2nd, 2004, Hamad al-Neyl Abu Kassawy kissed his pregnant wife Tahani and their two children goodbye and left their home, just south of Khartoum in Sudan. They have not seen him since.
Hamad was a “suitcase trader”, part of a network of businessmen travelling between Syria, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates selling cheap household goods and clothes. Having finished his business trip he rang his wife to let her know he was on his way home from Syria but would stop off in Saudi Arabia for a couple of days to complete a Muslim pilgrimage. And then he vanished.
No phone calls, no messages, no clue to his whereabouts. His family didn’t know whether Hamad was alive or dead. Two months after he disappeared his third child, Asif, was born. With the family’s sole source of financial support gone, Tahani struggled to keep her family together and to look after Hamad’s elderly parents.
Eight months after her husband disappeared, she got a phone call from a man in Saudi Arabia. He had been visiting a relative in al-Madinah prison in the west of the country when Hamad approached him and begged him to contact his family in Sudan. He gave this stranger Tahani’s phone number and asked him to pass on a message.
Hamad was arrested by the Saudi authorities on June 26th, 2004, when he arrived in the city of Madina. He was accused of belonging to an Islamic terrorist organisation and appears to have been a suspect because of the nature of his job, which requires him to travel across the Middle East.
He is one of thousands of people detained in Saudi Arabia as part of the “war on terror”. They are invariably held for years without trial and without access to lawyers or the courts to challenge the legality of their detention. In 2010, more than 100 people were detained for suspected security-related offences, but many previously detained people have turned out to be campaigners for peaceful political reform in Saudi Arabia.
The policy of secrecy and denial used by the Saudi authorities in dealing with prisoners like Hamad means we cannot be sure how he is being treated.
Other detainees, however, have reported that methods of torture and ill-treatment include severe beatings with sticks, punching, suspension from the ceiling, use of electric shocks and sleep deprivation.
Hamad has now been in a Saudi prison for more than seven years. He has not seen his family at all in that time and he has never seen his youngest son. There are no charges against him. There has been no trial and there is no indication of when, or if, the Saudi authorities will proceed with his case.
Meanwhile, in Sudan, his family continues to wait, to worry, and to hope.
“The situation is very hard, very difficult and very terrible,” Tahani told Amnesty International.
“Things cannot continue the way they are. This is a family with an unknown future.”
Hamad and Tahani need your help. Please act now and call for Hamad to be charged and given a fair trial, or released and allowed to return to his family.
Write to his excellency Mr Abdulaziz Abdulrahman Aldriss, ambassador of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia, 6-7 Fitzwilliam Square East, Dublin 2, or take action online at amnesty.ie