Riyadh, June 17: Human Rights Watch has called on Saudi Arabia to free a rights activist it says was arrested for criticising attacks by Sunni clerics on Shiite Muslims.
Police told activist Mikhlif bin Dahham al-Shammari, a Sunni, that he was being detained because his online articles “criticised statements of clerics attacking Shiite Muslims,” HRW said in a statement issued late on Wednesday.
“Arresting Mikhlif al-Shammari simply for opinions he expressed peacefully shows the limited reach of King Abdullah’s commitment so far, five years into his reign, to protect human rights,” HRW’s Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson was quoted as saying.
“King Abdullah… should instruct officers of the Criminal Investigation Department in Khobar to immediately release (Shammari)… who apparently was detained arbitrarily,” the rights watchdog said.
Shammari was arrested on June 15 in Jubail, 80 kilometres (about 50 miles) north of his home in Khobar in eastern Saudi Arabia, HRW said, adding he began a hunger strike on June 16 to protest his detention.
He had been arrested on May 15, also over the articles criticising anti-Shiite views, but was released.
And in 2007, he had been taken in and detained for three months after visiting prominent Saudi Shiite cleric Sheikh Hasan al-Saffar.
HRW said that Shammari has worked to improve Sunni-Shiite relations, “including by writing articles against disparagement of Shiites by Sunni extremists.”
Mainly concentrated in Eastern Province, Shiites make up 10-15 percent of the population of Saudi Arabia, where Sunni Islam is the official practice.
The kingdom’s Shiites complain the authorities restrict their worship activities and that Shiite activists are frequently jailed without charge.
–Agencies