Saudi campaign to abduct and silence rivals abroad goes back decades
ISTANBUL —Faisal al Jarba fled his native Saudi Arabia late last year as the danger drew near — after his patron, a powerful Saudi prince, was arrested and after a friend died in suspicious circumstances while in government custody.
Jarba, a leading sheikh in a large tribe, traveled to the Jordanian capital, Amman, joining relatives there. But that was not nearly far enough. Jordanian security officers surrounded his house one evening in early June and took him away for questioning, assuring his family he would be back soon.
Within days, however, he was driven to the border with Saudi Arabia and handed over to the Saudi authorities, according to two people familiar with the details of Jarba’s forced repatriation, which has not previously been reported. There have been no charges filed against Jarba, 45, and in the five months since he was captured, his family has received no proof that he is still alive, the people said.
The killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul last month by a team of Saudi agents dispatched from Riyadh has prompted fresh scrutiny of the kingdom’s pursuit of Saudi nationals abroad, from ordinary dissidents to defectors from the tight ranks of the royal family.
The effort to silence Saudi critics abroad stretches back decades and over the tenure of several monarchs. But Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s current de facto ruler, has pursued the practice with an especially ruthless zeal, analysts said, even making the return of dissenters abroad a formal policy of the state, according to a Saudi official, who insisted such returns were to be negotiated rather than coerced.
To repatriate its critics, the Saudi government has tried to lure to them back or enlisted friendly regional governments to arrest them or even carried out brazen kidnappings in Europe.
Saudi nationals have vanished from hotel rooms, been snatched from cars or had planes they were flying on diverted. One Saudi dissident prince said in a court filing that he was injected in the neck and spirited away on a private jet from Geneva to Saudi Arabia. Years later, after he managed to leave the kingdom, he disappeared again and has not been heard from since.
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