Former Twitter employee sent to 3 yrs jail for spying for Saudi

A former Twitter executive convicted of spying for Saudi Arabia has been sentenced to over three years in prison in the United States.

Ahmad Abouammo was sentenced to three and a half years in prison on Wednesday, December 14, 2022, in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

Twitter’s former media partnership manager for the Middle East region, Ahmad Abouammo – a dual US-Lebanese citizen – convicted in August 2022, after a trial in federal court in San Francisco. He had faced a 10-year prison sentence for one count and 20 years for each of several other counts.

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Prosecutors stated that since 2014, Abouammo has accepted bribes from Saudi officials. At Twitter, he helped monitor relationships with journalists and public figures in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

He was convicted of transmitting sensitive information from the company’s systems to help Saudi officials identify and locate Twitter users of interest.

He was also convicted of money laundering, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and falsifying records.

The Saudi government severely punishes anti-government expression on social media sites such as Twitter. In April, courts sentenced Salma Al-Shehab, a 34-year-old Saudi national and mother of two, to 34 years in prison for tweets protesting against the government.

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