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Saudi Arabia has freed a 72-year-old American citizen who had been jailed over critical tweets about the kingdom’s government and crown prince, his son said Tuesday.
Saad Ibrahim Almadi, a dual U.S.-Saudi national and retired project manager who had been living in Florida, had been imprisoned for more than a year and sentenced to 19 years.
His son, Ibrahim Almadi, told NBC News early Tuesday that all charges against his father had been dropped, and that he was at his home in Riyadh with his family, but that he was banned from travelling.
“He considers the United States home, not Saudi,” Ibrahim said of his father, adding that he was concerned for the elder Almadi’s health.
“He needs immediate medical treatment and attention in the United States. For that [reason], the travel ban is quite concerning to us,” he added. Ibrahim said he was confident the family would be able to bring his father back to his family in the U.S., with the assistance of the State Department.
Neither Saudi authorities or the U.S. government have confirmed Almadi’s release.
The case was one of many alleged human rights abuses to strain ties between the two countries, which had a public spat last year over oil supply after clashing over the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
President Joe Biden said previously that he had raised concerns about Almadi’s imprisonment and the cases of other U.S. citizens during meetings with King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman when he visited Saudi Arabia in July to reset relations
Since the ascent of the crown prince — a de factor ruler who is seeking to open up and modernize the ultraconservative kingdom — human rights groups have raised growing concern about Saudi authorities’ crackdown on dissent.
Almadi’s son said his father was arrested on several charges, including supporting terrorism, shortly after landing in Riyadh in Nov. 2021 to visit family.
He was sentenced to 16 years by a criminal court in Oct. 2022, his son said. Last month, an appeals court increased his sentence to 19 years.
Ibrahim said his father was detained over several tweets sent over the last few years.
He added that his father was not an activist but a private citizen who expressed his opinions on Twitter while in the U.S., where freedom of speech is a constitutional right.
Almadi’s tweets included one noting the crown prince’s consolidation of power in the kingdom and a tweet that remarked on Khashoggi’s killing, according to The Associated Press.
The news of Almadi’s release comes a week after his son met with State Department representatives. “I blew the whistle on Saad[‘s] condition,” Ibrahim wrote on Twitter on Mar. 14.
“His only way back is through wrongfully detained recognition. They assure me the process [is] ongoing and freedom of speech should never be criminalized,” he continued.
In a statement released Tuesday, the Freedom Initiative, a U.S. based human rights organization that advocates for the freedom of prisoners wrongfully detained across the Middle East and North Africa, welcomed the news.
“We are relieved that Saad Almadi has been released, but he should have never spent a day behind bars for innocuous tweets,” Abdullah Alaoudh, the Saudi director at the organization, said in the statement.
Freedom Initiative says at least six U.S. persons are currently detained or trapped under politically motivated travel bans in Saudi Arabia.
“There are far too many people in Saudi detention who don’t have the benefit of U.S. citizenship to draw attention to their cases,” Alaoudh added. “Almadi’s release shows that strategic pressure works, and U.S. officials should continue to press for release of prisoners and lifting of travel bans.”
