Kuwaiti court sentences Twitter user for 10yrs for insult

[DJKeefy]

Kuwaiti court sentences Twitter user for 10 years for Prophet insult.

A lower court in Kuwait sentenced a Shia user of the social networking website Twitter to 10 years in jail on Monday on charges of insulting Islam's Prophet Mohamed, his wife Aisha and companions, his lawyer Khaled al-Shatti said.

"We plan to challenge the ruling against my client Hamad al-Naqi in the appeals court and we are very optimistic that the higher court will cancel the sentence," Shatti told AFP.

Naqi, 22, was also charged with insulting the Gulf regimes of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and for spreading false news that undermined Kuwait's image abroad.

The charges were based on a number of posts on his Twitter account, but Naqi told the interrogators that his account had been hacked, the lawyer said.

Naqi was arrested about three months ago and has been behind bars ever since.

In recent months, Kuwaiti courts have issued jail terms against tweeters and activists amid a sharp rise in sectarian tensions between the emirate's Sunni majority and Shia minority.

Parliament, which is controlled by Islamists and conservatives, passed a law last month stipulating the death penalty for serious religious offenses, but the bill has not yet been enacted.

Source: http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/ku ... het-insult

[Horus]

The only thing that will be undermining Kuwait's image abroad is when people read about these stupid laws that they implement to enforce some religious doctrine.

[LovelyLadyLux]

I have never tweeted or twittered in my life but I get the sense that if you do tweet that it appears somewhere on the net in print for all the world to read?

I guess I can understand somebody tweeting (if it is like sending an sms message) but WHO has time to read all of this twittery stuff AND WHO would even want to read all this twittery stuff?

[DJKeefy]

You only follow who you want to follow for, example friends or something of interest to you.

The reason I posted this is because something similar happened here a few months ago to an Egyptian (but he got less jail time), then I made a post either on here or Luxor4u about a month ago about the Egyptian goverment making a law to jail and fine people who insulted Islam, it looks like its going down the road of an Islamic ruled country.

[Horus]

Any religion that is so afraid of what people say about it or it's beliefs has to be founded on pretty shakey ground if it has to be enforced by punishing anyone who may criticise or mock it.

[LovelyLadyLux]

I kinda wonder 'who' has the time to be running around reading what all is on people's cell phones. Strikes me as a pretty fear based response if one is so insecure that one has to do this. To learn via punishment isn't at all productive and is probably more counter productive than anything else.