The jury of a San Francisco court decided that Hmad Abouammo had sold personal information on anonymous users in Riyadh, in exchange for tens of thousands of dollars. It faces between 10 and 20 years in prison.
Le Monde with AFP
A former Twitter employee was tried on Tuesday August 9, guilty of spying on social network users on behalf of Saudi Arabia, who sought to know the identity of critical people of the regime and the Royal family. The jury of a San Francisco court judged that the evidence was sufficient to consider that Hmad Abouammo had sold personal information on anonymous users in Riyadh. The man who lives in Seattle would have received in exchange several tens of thousands of dollars and a luxury watch.
“The evidence has shown that, for money and when he thought he was doing this out of sight, the accused sold his post (from twitter) to a loved one” of the family ” Royal Saudi, said federal prosecutor Colin Sampson at the jury last week after two weeks of trial. He risks between 10 and 20 years in prison for acting on behalf of a foreign government and for money laundering, fraud and falsification of documents. His sentence will be pronounced on a later date.
This verdict comes after the criticisms addressed by human rights defenders to Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron for their diplomatic policy with regard to Crown Prince Mohammed Ben Salman Al Saoud, dismissed from the international scene after the journalist’s assassination Saudi Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Arabia Consulate in Turkey in 2018.
The other defendant was able to escape from the United States before the trial
Many NGOs regularly accuse the leader, nicknamed “MBS”, and his regime of spying, removing and torturing dissidents, which Riyad demented.
Ahmad Abouammo was arrested in Seattle in November 2019. The prosecution criticized him, as well as another former Twitter employee, Ali Alzabarah, for having been approached by Riyadh at the end of 2014-start 2015 in order to transmit user data accessible only internally (e-mail address, telephone number, date of birth, etc.). Mr. Abouammo left Twitter in 2015. Ali Alzabarah, a Saudi, left the United States.
Angela Chuang, Ahmad Abouammo’s lawyer, acknowledged that a Saudi operation could have been set up in order to obtain information on opponents of Twitter employees ago . But according to her, her client was tried in place of Mr. Alzabarah. “It is obvious that the accused that the government was looking for are not there,” she said. Twitter, requested by the France-Presse agency, did not wish to comment on the verdict.
The platform accuses its former employee of not having respected the rules of the company by not declaring to his hierarchy having received 100,000 dollars and a watch worth more than 40,000 dollars from ‘A close to the Saudi monarchy.
It was “pocket money” for Saudis people used to opulence, the jurors Ms. Chuang said