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A blogger will be publicly
flogged as part of his 10-year jail term for 'ridiculing Islamic
religious figures'.
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Raif Badawi, who co-founded the Free
Saudi Liberals website, was arrested in 2012 and sentenced to 1,000 lashes and
a decade in prison for insulting Islam on his online forum.
The online activist was found guilty
of cyber-crime in May last year and ordered by the Jiddah Criminal Court to pay
a fine of 1 million Saudi riyals, or about £175,900.
He was also charged with apostasy,
which carries the death penalty in the Saudi Kingdom, but he was cleared of
this crime in 2013.
Amnesty International said Badawi
would receive 50 lashes and the rest of the sentence would be carried
out over a period of 50 weeks.
'It is horrifying to think that such
a vicious and cruel punishment should be imposed on someone who is guilty of
nothing more than daring to create a public forum for discussion and peacefully
exercising the right to freedom of expression,' said Philip Luther, Amnesty's
Middle East and North Africa director.
'Sometimes the lashes are confined
to the buttocks, more often it seems they are spread out from the neck to the
ankles, and usually with the prisoner simply lying face down on the ground.
Badawi was originally sentenced in
2013 to seven years in prison and 600 lashes, but after an appeal, the judge
stiffened the punishment.
Following his arrest, his wife and
children left the kingdom for Canada.
Badawi's lawyer Waleed Abul-Khair
was sentenced in July to 15 years imprisonment and barred from traveling for
another 15 years after being found guilty by an anti-terrorism court of
'undermining the regime and officials,' ''inciting public opinion' and
'insulting the judiciary.'
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