In June 2021, the Public Prosecution in Saudi Arabia demanded the Hirabah sentence to be imposed against Saud Muhammad Al-Faraj. Saudi Arabia had arrested Al-Faraj in December 2019, during a military raid on the house where he lived with his wife and child. After taking all of them to prison without a judicial warrant, Saudi Arabia separated Al-Faraj, his wife and child. Although his wife was released after 18 days, Saudi Arabia deliberately did not inform Al-Faraj in order to further harm him and blackmail him, and he remained ignorant of their fate for a year and nine months.
Al-Faraj was subjected to enforced disappearance after his arrest, and his family could not know his whereabouts. He was also deprived of his basic right to have a lawyer, which is a systematic procedure that Saudi Arabia adopts with detainees during the investigation and certification period. Al-Faraj was kept in solitary confinement for one year and nine months. wo weeks after his arrest, the interrogator took him into a room overlooking another room through a glass window and saw his wife. The interrogator said that he would make him watch him rape his wife with others, if he did not confess to the charges against him. In addition, Al-Faraj was subjected to severe physical torture by several officers, which led to him losing consciousness more than once, and he was taken several times to the hospital by a wheelchair. The torture also caused swelling in his body and repeatedly prevented him from releasing the handcuffs on his hands and feet. Al-Faraj was also stripped naked during one of the interrogation sessions in an attempt to humiliate him.
Al-Faraj was forced to fingerprint on white papers, and the investigator also tore one of the investigation notebooks in which Al-Faraj wrote his statements of his own free will and forced him to write statements in his dictates. In May 2021, 19 months after his arrest, Saud Al-Faraj called his family and informed them that he was still alive, and knew during the call that his wife was not detained, and that the investigators had hidden the matter from him with the aim of psychologically torturing him.
Al-Faraj was prominently active in the demonstrations accompanying the Arab Spring in the city of Qatif 2011, in which the protesters raised slogans calling for the release of political detainees, an end to sectarian discrimination, and political reform.
During Al-Faraj visit to the civil status in Qatif Governorate in 2016 in order to add his wife in the civil registry, he discovered that his electronic services were disabled. After he went to the police station for inquiries, he was informed that his services had been suspended by order of the General Investigations to force his brother Hussein to surrender.
Saud had received a call, two weeks after the arrest of his brother, the human rights defender Hussein al-Faraj, in January 2017, from a security official in the General Investigation Service who identified himself as "Lieutenant-Colonel Abu Muhammad" and informed him that the suspension of his services had been cancelled. In February 2017, Saud received another call from the same official asking to meet him at the Sherton Hotel in Dammam. The security official asked Saud al-Faraj to carry out a mission that would benefit the "homeland" on several levels, internally, regionally and internationally, while receiving a financial reward for that. After Al-Faraj inquired about the mission, he told him that he had to convince a group of young people to travel to Iran, Lebanon and Iraq for military training, and he would provide him with the money needed for that in order to buy tickets, and that he had to delude them that he had made the necessary arrangements and the people who would receive them and send them to the camps, and then he had to provide him the names of the people who were lured and their flight numbers. After Al-Faraj refused this task and told the official that it was a devilish game that his conscience prevented him from doing, the lieutenant colonel (Abu Muhammad) threatened him with "trouble" that would happen to him.
In June 2021, the Public Prosecution brought several charges against Saud Al-Faraj, some of which were not included in the investigation books that were written under physical and psychological torture. Some of the charges were based on the confessions of other detainees, information indicates that they were also subjected to similar torture.
Among the charges leveled against him are calling, participating and promoting demonstrations and sit-ins, communicating with human rights organizations, belonging to a terrorist organization, and training on weapons with others. On the basis of these charges, which were based on serious violations of the basic rights of the accused before he was brought before the court, the Public Prosecution demanded Hirabah sentence to be imposed against him.
The European Saudi Organization for Human Rights affirms that the physical and psychological torture that Al-Faraj was subjected to is a systematic policy in Saudi Arabia, and a consistent introduction to sham trials in the country, which lack the simplest international standards for fair courts. It also believes that Saudi Arabia is using its regional caliphate in order to justify the liquidation of activists and opinion holders, by exaggerating their accusations and linking them to violence and to groups on its list of terrorism.