The General Intelligence Service had detained him along with his brother Sabah on 19/07/2007 in a wave of arrests including, for the first time in five years, ladies: Ms. Rima Al Juraysh, wife of the detainee Muhammad al-Hamili, Ms. Manal al-Amrini, wife of the detainee Khalid al-Saawi, Durriya al-Amrini, wife of the detainee Adil al-Khalidi, as well as Ashwaq and Farah Al Fuhayd, the two sisters of the detainee Hani Al Fuhayd. The Saudi authorities had later released the detained women one by one. The General Intelligence Service had made these arrests following a sit-in by 15 women and 7 children protesting the detention of their relatives without trial on the previous Monday; the sit-in was broken up that evening by the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue (the so-called religious police.)
While Alkarama considers this release a positive step by the Saudi authorities, it notes that the detention of major civilian and religious personalities in the Kingdom continues without any legal proceedings or trial, under the guise of drying up the sources of terrorist funding or other such unfounded accusations. Such cases include, for example: Saud Mukhtar al-Hashimi, Abdurrahman ash-Shumayri, Sulayman ar-Rashudi, Isam Hasan Basrawi, Abdulaziz al-Khariji, Musa al-Qarni, ash-Sharif Sayfuddin Faysal Al Sharif, and Muhammad Hasan al-Qurashi, Khalid as-Saawi, Muhammad al-Hamili and Hani Al Fuhayd.
On the occasion of Prof. Abdallah Al Hamed’s release, Alkarama again calls on the Saudi authorities immediately to release the political detainees, and strongly condemns the fact that a large number of the detainees continue to be jailed without trial under accusations of “terrorism”.