A 72-year-old US citizen was tortured and sentenced to 16 years in prison in Saudi Arabia over tweets criticizing the kingdom, his family says

• A 72-year-old US citizen was sentenced to 16 years in prison in Saudi Arabia, his son told media.
• Saad Ibrahim Almadi was arrested for 14 tweets criticizing the Saudi government, his son said.

A retired project manager from Florida was tortured and sentenced to 16 years in prison by Saudi Arabia over tweets he made in the US that criticized the Saudi government, his son says.

Saad Ibrahim Almadi, 72, holds dual US-Saudi citizenship. He was arrested in November while visiting family in Saudi Arabia and was sentenced earlier this month, according to his son Ibrahim, who first spoke to The Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin in an opinion piece published Sunday.

Almadi was arrested for making 14 tweets over the last seven years, including some criticizing corruption and policy decisions in the Saudi government, his son said. The retired project manager also posted a tweet referencing Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist notoriously murdered by his own country's agents in 2018, said Ibrahim, per The Post.

—Gurbaksh Singh Chahal (@gchahal) October 18, 2022

State Department deputy spokesman Vedant Patel confirmed on Tuesday that Almadi had been detained by Saudi Arabia, per the Associated Press.

"We have consistently and intensively raised our concerns regarding the case at senior levels of the Saudi government, both through channels in Riyadh and Washington DC as well and we will continue to do so," Patel told reporters, according to the AP.

"We have raised this with members of the Saudi government as recently as yesterday," he added, per the outlet.

Speaking to The Guardian, Ibrahim said Saudi agents kidnapped his father from an airport and detained him in a hotel while searching his phone.

Almadi had felt safe traveling to Saudi Arabia for a visit because of his American citizenship and because his tribe had good connections there, Ibrahim told The Guardian.

Almadi was later convicted of harboring a terrorist ideology, trying to destabilize the Saudi kingdom, and supporting and funding terrorism, according to The Post.

He was also given a 16-year travel ban on top of his imprisonment, meaning that if the full sentence is carried out, he'd be 87 years old upon his release and 104 years old when he is allowed to return to the US, the outlet reported.

Ibrahim accused the Saudi government of torturing his father when his family contacted the US State Department in March, per the Associated Press.

He also alleged in his interview with the AP that the State Department had mishandled his father's case by not declaring him a "wrongfully detained" American, which would have elevated the priority of Almadi's case.

The US State Department did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

Yet another case in Saudi Arabia's crackdown on dissent

Almadi's arrest and sentencing is the second high-profile incident this year in which Saudi Arabia — traditionally seen as a US ally — handed a lengthy prison sentence to one of its citizens over social media posts they made while abroad.

Salma al-Shehab, a Saudi student attending Leeds University in the UK, was sentenced to 34 years in prison for retweeting activists who condemned the Saudi government, The Guardian reported in August. She had a small following herself, with 159 followers on Instagram and fewer than 3,000 followers on Twitter, per the outlet.

—Amnesty International (@amnesty) August 18, 2022

In another case, Saudi national Nourah bint Saeed al-Qahtani was sentenced to 45 years in prison for her tweets, human rights group Democracy for the Arab World Now said in August.

The arrests are generally seen in the West as a crackdown on dissent under the rising Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. He's pushed to diversify Saudi Arabia's economy and called for a "more moderate Islam" in his country, but has also been mired in controversy over his hardline approach to criticism.

President Joe Biden met with Prince Mohammed in July, when the pair was videoed bumping fists. Critics of Biden's visit to Saudi Arabia said he undermined his 2019 pledge to make Saudi Arabia a "pariah" state in the wake of Khashoggi's assassination.

—Kevin Liptak (@Kevinliptakcnn) July 15, 2022

More recently, already tense relations between the US and Saudi Arabia fractured further when the OPEC+ group said earlier this month that they would cut oil production by two million barrels a day in coordination with Russia.

The White House called the announcement a "clear" indicator that OPEC+, which includes Saudi Arabia, was "aligning with Russia."

"There's going to be some consequences for what they've done, with Russia," Biden said in a CNN interview.