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Saudi Arabian court orders jail, lashes for Canadian teen
 A court in Saudi Arabia has reportedly sentenced a Canadian teenager to spend one year in prison and receive 200 lashes for his involvement in a schoolyard brawl that left a man dead. Mahmoud Al-Ken, a reporter for a Montreal Arabic radio station, said the family of 17-year-old Sultan Kohail told him the teen had been sentenced on Saturday. In a prior ruling handed down March 3, Kohail's 23-year-old brother, Mohamed, was sentenced to death by beheading for the same incident.The Kohails have maintained that they're both innocent. Their family says Mohamed Kohail didn't get a fair trial, with the entire case consisting of 10 brief court hearings totalling about 90 minutes. Also, the court refused to hear any defence witnesses, the family maintains. Earlier this week, Mohamed's lawyer was kicked out of court after he tabled documents for the 23-year-old's appeal. The judges, the same ones who sentenced Mohamed, also threatened to revoke the lawyer's licence. Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day's department has urged Saudi authorities to overturn the death sentence. Sultan and Mohamed Kohail were detained in January 2007 after a brawl in which an 18-year-old Syrian student died of internal injuries. A third accused, a Jordanian national, has also been sentenced to death. The fight apparently began when one of the men claimed Sultan had insulted a girl. "I didn't even talk to the girl," Sultan insisted Thursday in an interview with the Canadian Press. He said he was surrounded by a gang of almost a dozen men as he left school that day and that one of them tried to beat him on the head with a stick. The Kohail family immigrated to Canada from Saudi Arabia in 2000 and had been living in the Montreal suburb of Dollard des Ormeaux before they moved back to their homeland temporarily in 2006. Posted by: Fred 2008-04-06 |
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