Originally posted to The Guardian’s website, 13 September 2019
A French court has given the daughter of Saudi Arabia’s King Salman a 10-month suspended sentence for ordering her bodyguard to detain and beat a workman who was renovating a family apartment in Paris.
Hassa bint Salman, who was not in court for the verdict, was also fined €10,000 (£8,950). She left France soon after the 2016 incident, and although French authorities issued an international arrest warrant, she was tried in absentia.
Prosecutors said Hassa had flown into a rage with Ashraf Eid after he was called to repair a damaged washbasin in a luxury apartment block owned by the Saudi royal family near the Champs Élysées in central Paris.
While taking pictures of the bathroom, which he told investigators he needed to carry out his work, he caught her reflection on camera. Realising her image had been captured, she called in her bodyguard who tied Eid up, punched and kicked him and ordered him to kiss the princess’s feet.
Eid said he was only allowed to leave several hours later, after his phone had been destroyed, and claimed that at one point during his ordeal, the princess shouted: “Kill him, the dog, he doesn’t deserve to live.”
The punishment was heavier than prosecutors sought when the trial began in July. Hassa had been charged with complicity in an act of intentional violence, complicity in illegal confinement and complicity in theft, and they had recommended a six-month suspended sentence and a €5,000 fine.
Her bodyguard, Rani Saida, the only one of the three main protagonists to appear in court, was also found guilty on charges of violence, illegal confinement and theft. He was given an eight-month suspended sentence and a €5,000 fine.
A lawyer for Eid, a French-Egyptian plumber, saluted his client’s courage in bringing the case. The verdict was proof that “everyone is equal before the law”, Georges Karouni told journalists.
Lawyers for Hassa, who is the half-sister of Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and de facto leader, Mohammed bin Salman, said they were indignant about the verdict and had lodged an appeal.
“This sentence is backed by no concrete proof but rests solely on the unfounded, even mendacious, allegations made by the plaintiff who didn’t even turn up himself to the trial to support them,” said Hassa’s lawyer, Emmanuel Moyne.
“The princess was not present at any scene of violence nor did she order any act of violence … No evidence proves that the plaintiff was deprived of his freedom to come and go, especially not on the orders of the princess.”
Saudi state-run media often lionise Hassa, 42, as a charity worker and women’s rights campaigner, and her legal team said she had been the real vicitim.
“She has suffered two years of legal proceedings … as well as treatment by the media that has unfairly changed how she is seen,” said Lisa Janaszewicz.
Hassa’s bodyguard has lodged a separate case for defamation against Eid. The Saudi government communications office has not commented on the case.
It is not the Saudi royal family’s first run-in with French law. A court ordered the French assets of Princess Maha al-Sudairi, the wife of the former interior minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz, to be seized in 2013 over unpaid bills at a luxury hotel of almost €6m.
Nor is it the first time a member of the family has been convicted over violence toward an employee in a European court. Prince Saud Abdulaziz bin Nasser al Saud was found guilty in 2012 of killing his servant Bandar Abdulaziz at their five-star hotel suite in central London after a campaign of what was described sadistic abuse.
Link to the original post: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/12/french-court-finds-saudi-princess-complicit-in-workman-attack-hassa-bint-salman
