Saudi Arab

Saudi Torturers, Executioners Get British Training: Report

A British police program to train Saudi officers in hi-tech crime detection techniques could lead to the “torture and execution” of pro-democracy activists, a human rights charity says.

The College of Policing launched its training scheme in 2009 to teach authorities forensic techniques and has continued throughout the ongoing Islamic Uprising in the country, during which scores of pro-democracy activists were rounded up, tortured and executed.

Documents show the College of Policing noted there was a risk “the skills being trained are used to identify individuals who later go on to be tortured or subjected to other human rights abuses”.

“It is scandalous that British police are training Saudi Arabian officers in techniques which they privately admit could lead to people being arrested, tortured and sentenced to death,” said Maya Foa, of Reprieve.

“The training Britain delivered included hi-tech skills that could easily have been used to target pro-democracy activists in Saudi Arabia.”

In actual fact despite the risks, Reprieve says British police want to step up their training package to include advanced cyber-crime courses in analyzing mobile phone records, decrypting hard drives, voice recognition and CCTV trawling.

The project has been described as an “income generating business opportunity” for the College of Policing, which says it has a “trusted and professional partnership” with the Saudi Interior Ministry.

Labor MP Andy Slaughter, the shadow minister for human rights, said Britain should not have “anything to do with this criminal justice system”, saying the documents were “astonishing”.

“This is a regime which executed 47 people in one day this year, that still has minors on death row,” Mr. Slaughter said, referring to a mass execution in Saudi Arabia in January.

At the time, Britain issued its mildest possible condemnation of its close ally for the mass executions, which included prominent Shiite Muslim cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr.

Elsewhere, Britain continues to give Saudi forces targeting training, including for their cruise missile attacks, despite the international outrage over Riyadh’s war on Yemen, which has killed thousands of people.

Since the Saudi aggression on Yemen began on March 2015, the British government has licensed the sale of nearly $4 billion worth of weaponry to the Saudi Kingdom.

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