Who Is Salma al-Shehab? Saudi Woman Gets 34-Year Prison Term For Using Twitter

A Saudi university student from Leeds who had visited her home country on vacation was given a 34-year prison term for having a Twitter account and for following and retweeting activists and dissidents. The case also serves as the most recent illustration of how Saudi Arabia's crown prince Mohammed bin Salman has used Twitter users as a target in his campaign of repression while also holding a sizable indirect stake in the US social media giant through the Public Investment Fund, the country's sovereign wealth fund (PIF).

After US President Joe Biden's visit to Saudi Arabia, which human rights advocates had warned could embolden the kingdom to further up its crackdown on dissidents and other pro-democracy campaigners, the special terrorism court in Saudi Arabia sentenced the defendants, according to reports.

Who Is Salma al-Shehab

For the "crime" of using an online website to "create public disturbance and destabilise civil and national security," 34-year-old Salma al-Shehab, a mother of two young children, was initially given a sentence of three years in prison. But on Monday, an appeals court changed the sentence, imposing a 34-year prison term followed by a 34-year travel restriction, after the public prosecutor asked the court to take other alleged offences into account.

The latest allegations include the claim that Shehab was "assisting people who attempt to generate public unrest and jeopardise civil and national security by following their Twitter accounts" and by retweeting their messages, according to a translation of the court documents viewed by the Guardian. It's reported that Shehab might still be able to file a fresh appeal in this instance.

Shehab was reportedly not a prominent or particularly outspoken Saudi activist, either in the kingdom or the UK. She identified herself as a dental hygienist, medical educator, PhD candidate at Leeds University, lecturer at Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, wife, and mother to her kids Noah and Adam on Instagram, where she had 159 followers.

She had 2,597 followers, according to her Twitter profile. Shehab occasionally retweeted tweets by Saudi dissidents in exile that demanded the liberation of political prisoners in the kingdom, in addition to tweets about Covid's burnout and images of her young children. She appeared to support the case of Loujain al-Hathloul, a well-known Saudi feminist activist who has endured imprisonment and is suspected of having been subjected to torture for advocating for the rights of women to drive and is currently residing in a country where travel is prohibited.

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Shehab, according to a source who knew her, could not tolerate injustice. She was described as intelligent, and a voracious reader, and has come to the UK in 2018 or 2019 to begin her PhD at Leeds. In December 2020, she travelled back to Saudi Arabia with the intention of bringing her husband and two children with her. She was subsequently summoned by Saudi officials for questioning, detained, and put on trial as a result of her tweets.