SAUDI BABYLON: TORTURE, CORRUPTION AND COVER-UP INSIDE THE HOUSE OF SAUD

Sandy Mitchell, an anaesthetist working in Riyadh, was seized by secret police in December 2000 and savagely beaten until he confessed to having assassinated a British hospital engineer. Mitchell had a perfectly good alibi for the day of the murder, but his interrogators were not interested. They were out to pin the blame for recent bombings on foreigners, rather than admit that they were the work of home-grown terrorists linked to al-Qa'eda. It took nearly 11 months for Mitchell to be allowed to see a lawyer, by which time he had already been sentenced to death in a summary trial. It was not until August 2003 that he was freed and permitted to return to Britain. Mark Hollingsworth argues that the main reason for Mitchell's release and that of three other Britons also wrongly held and tortured was not pressure from the Foreign Office but what he describes as Saudi Arabia's 9/11. That was the bombing in May 2003 of a housing compound in Riyadh in which many foreigners, including Americans training the Saudi National Guard, were living. Thirty-five people were killed and 200 were injured. The attack awoke the authorities to the nature of the internal threat posed by al-Qa'eda and destroyed the myth that the car-bombings were the work of Westerners.