The news that a Saudi prince is on trial in London for killing an aide who was reputedly also his gay lover will be enormously embarrassing to the government back in Riyadh. Saudis dislike bad publicity intensely, and especially when it involves a case as horrific as an alleged princely murder — as we in Britain should know well. In 1980, the Saudi government expelled our ambassador and banned Concorde from its airspace after ITV screened Death of a Princess, about a young member of the royal family who was executed for the “crime” of conducting a secret relationship.
In the opinion of David Gardner, author of Last Chance: the Middle East in the Balance (and who wrote a fascinating essay on Saudi Arabia for the NS last year): “This prince has become a very hot potato for the Saudi ruling family. Though a minor princeling, he is the grandson of a king who has tried to project an image of austere probity, to limit the power of the clerical establishment and curb the excesses of the more wayward and corrupt royals.
“Then along comes this . . . which presses just about every Wahhabi button in its transgression: murder and homosexuality against a backdrop of phenomenal quantities of alcohol and drugs.”
Shamefully, however, just as humiliating for the royal family will be the revelations that Prince Saud bin Abdulaziz bin Nasir al-Saud, who is King Abdullah’s grandson, is homosexual. The details of the case make this plain — something called the Spartacus International Gay Guide was found in his room, and two male escort agencies testified he had used their services since checking in to the hotel.
It is not as though homosexuality is unknown in Saudi Arabia. In a daring piece for the NS in 2007, Harry Nicolaides wrote of one attempted pick-up he experienced. (So daring was the piece, in fact, that at the time I couldn’t believe his lack of regard for his own safety. My worries proved well founded, as Harry’s bravery, or recklessness, was later to land him in jail in Thailand for violating lèse majesté laws.) And Robert Lacey devoted a section of his recent book Inside the Kingdom to an account of the prevalence of lesbianism in Saudi — a chapter to which some reviewers paid rather overenthusiastic attention.
But officially this “vice” is not tolerated, and sodomy is punishable by death. This is in line with a society that likes to insist on its version of the truth and airbrush awkward episodes from the official record. If you look up the country’s second ruler, King Saud, for instance, on the kingdom’s official government website you will not be told that he was an obese, lazy, spendthrift playboy who proved so incompetent that the almost unthinkable step of deposing him was taken in order to make way for his brother Faisal. No, you merely find a bland paragraph listing his “achievements” and dates on the throne.
The Saudi government, however, cannot control coverage of Prince Saud’s trial. Surprise, surprise, if you try to look it up on the website of Arab News, a Saudi-owned English-language newspaper, the closest you get is a four-day-old story about Russia commending a different Prince Saud (the king’s nephew) as a diplomat. But as this fascinating article in the Atlantic shows, internet restrictions are easily bypassed by the kingdom’s citizens, not least by those logging on to gay dating sites.
Prince Saud’s story will soon be known. Perhaps some of those reading it will shudder, and give thanks that nothing similar happened to them — after all, they may have met him online already . . .
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