Saudi Arabian blogger sentenced to 1,000 lashes could now face the death penalty

(Image credit: Twitter.com/Independent)

published 3 March 2015

The wife of Raif Badawi, the Saudi Arabian blogger currently serving 10 years in prison and facing 1,000 lashes after criticizing clerics on his site, says that her husband could soon face the death penalty on apostasy charges.

Ensaf Haidar told The Independent official sources inside Saudi Arabia told her that criminal court judges want to try him for apostasy, even though charges were thrown out in 2013 after Badawi told the court he was Muslim; the evidence against him was the fact that he "liked" a Facebook page for Arab Christians. His family had been hoping that international condemnation against his sentence would pressure Saudi Arabia to release him from prison. Badawi has been flogged once, and subsequent punishments have been postponed, The Independent reports.

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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