http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/14/saudiarabia-humanrightsHow I survived chop chop square
I was tortured and sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia. As a westerner, I was eventually released, but others are not so lucky William Sampson guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 14 October 2008 05.30 EDT
In theory I should now be dead. Not from disease or an accident but because of the simple fact that my head was set to be severed from my body with a sharp sword in a public square in Riyadh, the Saudi Arabian capital.
In 2001, I was condemned to die in this brutal archaic fashion after being caught up in what became known as the "Saudi Brits" affair. Along with eight others, I was rounded up by the panicked Saudi authorities after a series of attacks on foreigners in the kingdom suddenly started to make this expat country of choice seem distinctly unsafe.
Desperate to pin a nascent anti-government insurgency on squabbling "bootlegger" foreigners (anything rather than concede that ultra-safe Saudi Arabia had an internal terrorism problem), we were to be the sacrificial lambs. Remember those bizarre, wooden "confessions", haltingly delivered by scared looking men on national Saudi television? One of those came from me. If I looked petrified it may have been because I'd been dragged to prison, threatened, sleep-deprived and beaten so severely that I almost died from heart attacks.
In a numbed state of shock, I would have confessed to anything. As it was, I said I'd committed a series of laughably implausible "turf war" crimes that never even existed. The farce continued. I was subjected to two perfunctory, completely scripted trials at which I was told to plead guilty and beg for mercy. I was sentenced to death, tried again twice without even being in the courtroom at all, and again sentenced to death by beheading.
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