Saudi Babylon: Torture, Corruption and Cover-Up Inside the House of Saud

When Sandy Mitchell was arrested for his alleged involvement in two bombings in Saudi Arabia in December 2000, he assumed it was a case of mistaken identity and that he would soon be released. Instead, he spent the next 18 months in jail, where he was repeatedly tortured, before being forced to sign a confession. Mitchell was an innocent man—and the Saudi privately knew the attacks were the work of al-Qaeda militants. In July 2002, Mitchell was sentenced to death, but then suddenly released. This shocking miscarriage of justice also suggests a more disturbing truth—that Tony Blair and the Foreign Office, mindful of Britain’s massive arms sales to Saudi Arabia, abandoned Mitchell by adopting a soft diplomatic approach to the corrupt Saudi Royal Family. Based on diaries and records of meetings with ministers and officials, this is a powerful exposé of how the British government acts when one of its own citizens is illegally imprisoned and tortured by a regime with which it does business.