Daily Star - Wife of Ali Sebat Convicted in KSA Stages Sit in Outside Grand Serail

Copyright (c) 2010 The Daily Star

Saturday, June 12, 2010
Psychic's wife appeals for husband's release from Saudi Arabia


By The Daily Star

Elizabeth A. Kennedy
Associated Press

BEIRUT: The wife of a Lebanese TV psychic convicted in Saudi Arabia on charges of witchcraft appealed for her husband’s release Friday, just weeks after he escaped beheading in the kingdom.
Samira Rahmoon, 46, said Lebanese officials promised her in April that her husband would soon come home, two years after Saudi religious police arrested him during a religious pilgrimage there.
He was arrested by Saudi religious police at his hotel room in Medina and sentenced to death last November. He was due to be executed in May but Saudi officials decided not to go ahead with the beheading at the last minute after a public outcry.
“We are lost,” said Rahmoon, clutching a cracked frame holding a photograph of her husband, 49-year-old Ali Sibat, during a small protest outside the premier’s office in Beirut.
Saudi Arabia, which enforces a strict version of Islamic law, arrests dozens of people each year on sorcery charges, and the last known execution was in 2007, according to human-rights groups.
As Saudi Arabia has no written penal code, the charges are often vague, covering anything from fortunetelling to astrology to making charms believed to bring love, health or pregnancy. Saudi judges cite Koranic verses forbidding witchcraft, but such practices remain popular as a folk tradition. In Sibat’s case, the charges seem to center on a call-in talk show he hosted on a Lebanese satellite station where he would tell fortunes and give advice. His supporters point out the show was aired from Lebanon, not Saudi Arabia.
The Sibat family’s lawyer in Lebanon, May Khansa, said the family, including two teenage children and a 5-year-old daughter is suffering. “We have been promised by Lebanese officials that he will come back to his family,” Khansa said. “This is a miserable situation.” Premier Saad Hariri was traveling outside the country Friday and was not available to comment. Saudi officials could not be reached for comment either.
In late 2009, Human Rights Watch urged the Saudi authorities to overturn Sibat’s death sentence and halt its increasing and arbitrary use of “witchcraft” charges. “Saudi courts are sanctioning a literal witch hunt by the religious police,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Mideast director at the New-York based organization. “The crime of ‘witchcraft’ is being used against all sorts of behavior, with the cruel threat of state-sanctioned executions.” – with The Daily Star


Copyright (c) 2010 The Daily Star