Saudi Babylon: Torture, Corruption and Cover-Up Inside the House of Saud - Softcover

"No one gets off lightly in this account: not the Saudi princes who cream off percentages of arms deals; nor the craven Foreign Office; nor religious police who let Saudi schoolgirls burn to death, rather than be rescued, because they are improperly dressed" (Mail on Sunday)

"Hollingsworth powerfully challenges official complacency" (Daily Telegraph)

"Hollingsworth's account of Mitchell's experience, set against recent Saudi history, is utterly compelling" (The Observer)

"Gritty, eye-opening . . . a shocking account (****)" (Maxim)

When Sandy Mitchell was arrested for his alleged involvement in two bombings in Saudi Arabia in December 2000, he thought it was a case of mistaken identity and that he would soon be released. Instead, he spent nearly three years in jail, where he was repeatedly tortured before being forced to sign a confession and admit his guilt on Saudi television.

Throughout his incarceration the Saudi authorities knew that the attacks had been committed by al-Qaeda militants. Yet they kept Mitchell in jail and refused him access to a lawyer for a year. By this time he had been sentenced to death but he was eventually released before the penalty could be imposed.

Saudi Babylon is the story of a shocking miscarriage of justice. But it also reveals an even more disturbing truth: how the British government, mindful of multi-billion-pound arms sales to Saudi Arabia, virtually abandoned Mitchell by adopting a softly-softly diplomatic approach to the corrupt Saudi royal family.

Based on diaries and records of meetings with ministers and officials, this is a powerful exposé of how the British government acts when one of its citizens is illegally imprisoned and tortured by a regime with which it does business.