A Saudi PhD student at Leeds University who was given a 34-year jail sentence for posts on X has been freed, according to campaigners.
Mother-of-two Salma al-Shehab was arrested in January 2021 just days before her planned return from holiday in Saudi Arabia, due to posts on the site, formerly known as Twitter, in support of women’s rights. Judges said the posts were "disturbing public order" and "destabilising the social fabric".
She was convicted and sentenced in 2022, with judges ruling she had retweeted dissident accounts and “transmitted false rumours”. She was sentenced to 34 years behind bars in August 2022 before this was reduced to 27 years in January 2023.
Her release was announced on Monday by London-based Saudi rights group ALQST, after her sentence was dramatically reduced in September 2024 to four years in prison with an additional four years suspended.
The group said her “full freedom must now be granted, including the right to travel to complete her studies”.
Saudi Arabia has not officially acknowledged her release and did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ms Shehab, a women’s rights activist and dental hygienist, had used her social media accounts to advocate for women’s rights in Saudi Arabia and imprisoned Saudi human rights activists, ALQST says on its website.
Along with seven other women detained in Saudi prison, she started a hunger strike in March 2023 to demand unconditional release and protest against their unjust detention and trials. She later ended the strike to take medication due to a health deterioration, ALQST said.
Ms Shehab is a member of Saudi Arabia's Shia Muslim minority, which has long accused the kingdom’s Sunni rulers of systematic discrimination. Something the kingdom’s rulers have denied.
In April 2023, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention described Ms Shehab’s detention as arbitrary, urging Saudi authorities to release her and give her the right to compensation and reparations.
According to ALQST, she was imprisoned alongside inmates transferred from a psychiatric hospital. She appealed to the official Saudi Human Rights Commission for these inmates to be held separately and be given proper medical treatment - which she alleged they had been neglected.
After her conviction, 400 academics from UK universities signed an open letter calling on Liz Truss and her foreign secretary, James Cleverly, to act to set the PhD student free.
“Salma should be looking forward, like us, to the new academic year, instead of languishing behind bars for the ‘crime’ of tweeting her legitimate opinions,” it read.
