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Man tells of flogging - 250 lashes down, 50 to go
Two hundred and fifty lashes down, 50 to go, was how Melbourne man Robert Thomas last night described his ordeal of imprisonment and flogging in a Saudi Arabian jail for a crime he says he did not commit. Mr Thomas has been caned on his back in batches of 50. The next caning could come at any time. Mr Thomas, 56, from Caulfield, told The Age he has not bled so far and has remained conscious during the beatings, which Prime Minister John Howard yesterday described as "appallingly inhumane." Mr Thomas, an anaesthetic technician and chief of department at the Prince Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz hospital in the Saudi city of Bishah, was last year sentenced to 16 months in jail and 300 lashes by a Saudi court. His wife Lorna, a head nurse at the hospital, was charged over the theft of hospital equipment and sentenced to 16 months and 300 lashes. According to Mr Thomas, who has been working in Saudi Arabia for about 10 years, and previously worked at the Alfred Hospital and Cotham Private Hospital in Kew, the Saudi judge had accepted his not guilty plea. "The judge said that he was sure I did not steal but I must have known (of the crime) as Lorna was my wife and (a) husband always knows what his wife is doing," Mr Thomas wrote in a letter to his daughter Sarah Munro...
...Before they took Mr Thomas to be beaten, she says prison staff and fellow inmates gave him a chance to lessen the pain by converting to Islam. He refused the offer. Prisoners and guards gathered to see the flogging. "Because he is a non-Muslim, he gets a huge crowd when he is being flogged because everybody wants to see a non-Muslim getting lashed." Lovely place... Posted by: Anonymous 2003-03-05 |
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