Los Angeles, September 16: An openly gay Saudi Arabian diplomat in Los Angeles who requested asylum in late August said he had received death threats since making it public on Saturday that he had asked to be allowed to stay in the US.
The diplomat, Ali Ahmad Asseri, was still awaiting word from American officials on his application on Tuesday, and said he feared execution if he returned to his home country.
Asseri sent a letter on Saturday to news outlets saying that employees at the Saudi Consulate had harassed him after they began to suspect that he was gay and after learning that a close friend was a Jewish Israeli woman.
“My life is in a great danger here,” Asseri wrote in the letter, “and if I go back to Saudi Arabia, they will kill me openly in broad daylight. I want my voice to be heard, and I want them to know that I am not alone.”
On the phone on Tuesday, Asseri said he had received several threats on his life this week since posting comments on a popular Arabic Web site that criticized ” militant imams” and threatened to expose embarrassing information about Saudi royalty living in the US. Asseri’s lawyer, Ally Bolour, said Saudi officials had terminated his position with the consulate and refused to renew his diplomatic passport.
“He has a tremendo us amount of courage to put his life on the line like this and come out in such a public way,” Bolour said. Asseri, who is in his 40s, had announced his intention to gain asylum “against my advice,” Bolour said. “I wish he hadn’t gone public.”
Nail al-Jubeir, a spokesman for the Saudi Embassy in Washington, said Saudi officials had not ended Asseri’s position, but transferred him to a post at the foreign ministry in Riyadh. Asseri, who said he had been in hiding since the summer, never showed up.
“His tour of duty in Los Angeles was completed after four years,” Jubeir said. “He applied for a one-year extension, and we granted that. But we didn’t renew his diplomatic passport because it was for his position in LA, and his position does not exist there anymore.”
At the consulate, Asseri was a first secretary, “a person with a college degree who has about 12 years in the foreign service,” Jubeir said. Asseri has worked in diplomatic positions in at least two countries.
-Agencies