Kuwaiti Shia sentenced to 10 years in jail on false charges of Twitter ‘blasphemy’

A court sentenced a 26-year-old Kuwaiti Shia Muslim to 10 years in prison on Monday after ruling that he had endangered state security, a false charge that was framed against him and he denied it.
He was booked on the false charges of blasphemy on social media, his lawyer Khaled al-Shatti said.
It is relevant to add here that for last two years, extremists within Kuwaiti Parliament and society were trying to victimize Shia Muslims in particular. For last two years, they have intensified their anti-Shia activities. The Parliamentarians were misusing the Parliament and Kuwaiti laws to serve their purposes.

“We plan to challenge the ruling against my client Hamad al-Naqi in the appeals court and we are very optimistic that the higher court will cancel the sentence,” Shatti told AFP according to Al-Arabia.

Naqi was also charged with “insulting” the Gulf regimes of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and for spreading news that undermined Kuwait’s image abroad.

The charges were based on a number of tweets on his Twitter account, but Naqi told the interrogators that his account had been hacked, the lawyer said.
Naqi was arrested about three months ago and has been behind bars since then.

The sentence was the maximum that Naqi could have received, his lawyer told Reuters. But anti-democracy and pro-kings extremists had called for him to be put to death in a high-profile and divisive case that has stoked what they called sectarian tensions in the Gulf state.

In recent months, Kuwaiti courts have issued jail terms against tweeters and activists.

Parliament, which is controlled by “Islamists” and “conservatives,” last month passed a law stipulating the death penalty for serious religious offences, but the bill has not yet been enacted.
Reports had it that Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain feel threatened by pro-democracy and anti-monarchy struggle of people in Arabian Peninsula and they were trying to encourage such moves to scare people.