© Fahad Shadeed/ReutersSaudi Arabia applies Islamic sharia law, which allows eye-for-an-eye punishment but allows victims to pardon convicts for blood money.
Amnesty International has condemned a reported Saudi Arabian court ruling that a young man should be paralysed as punishment for a crime he committed 10 years ago which resulted in the victim having to use a wheelchair.
Amnesty said Ali al-Khawaher, 24, was reported to have spent 10 years in jail waiting to be surgically paralysed unless his family pays 1m Saudi riyals (£176,000) to the victim.
Khawaher stabbed a friend in the spine during a dispute, paralysing him from the waist down. Saudi Arabia applies Islamic sharia law, which allows eye-for-an-eye punishment for crimes but allows victims to pardon convicts in exchange for so-called blood money.
"Paralysing someone as punishment for a crime would be torture," Ann Harrison, Amnesty's Middle East and north Africa deputy director, said. "That such a punishment might be implemented is utterly shocking, even in a context where flogging is frequently imposed as a punishment for some offences, as happens in Saudi Arabia."
The Arabic-language al-Hayat daily quoted Khawaher's 60-year-old mother as saying her son was a juvenile aged 14 at the time of the offence. She said the victim had demanded 2 million riyals to pardon her son and later reduced this to 1 million. "But we don't have even a tenth of this sum," she said.
Al-Hayat said an unnamed philanthropist was trying to raise funds to pay the blood money, but it was not clear how much time remained before Khawaher's sentence was to be carried out.
Amnesty said the case demonstrated the need for Saudi Arabia to review its laws to "start respecting their international obligations and remove these terrible punishments from the law".
Saudi judges have in the past ordered sharia punishments that include tooth extraction, flogging, eye gouging and - in murder cases - death.
Source: Reuters
Compared to all the other things the Saudi regime is engaged in with their corrupt Western friends, this seems like a non-event. It is their way. The real problem seems age and the fact that it took 10 years to get to this point, not to mention the money aspect. Did the Western media care to raise funds for the family of his 'friend' when he stabbed him and left him paralyzed? Is this just another example of propaganda control? Keep the 'help' fenced in for later use? The House of Saud might find their fortunes turning to sand blowing in the winds if they continue to follow this pattern of ignorance.