Saudi prince 'flown back to kingdom against his will'

A Saudi prince at the centre of a Swiss investigation into his alleged kidnapping by members of the Saudi government has reportedly been taken against his will to Saudi Arabia.

Staff members of Sultan bin Turki told the Guardian website that the prince boarded a Saudi plane in Paris on 1 February but never arrived at his destination of Cairo, where he planned to visit friends and his father, the Saudi king’s elder brother.

Prince Sultan is the third Saudi prince to go missing in suspicious circumstances in the last year, the Guardian said, as two other high-profile royal defectors also took up outspoken critical positions against the Saudi government before they too vanished.

Sultan has been engaged in the Swiss investigation of members of the Saudi government, who he alleges kidnapped him from Geneva in 2003 in a forced repatriation.

Staff members said his disappearance in February came after he boarded a Saudi plane with “reassurances” from senior Saudi royals.

“There was a Saudi plane with a flight plan to Cairo but the plane did not fly to Cairo,” an associate of the prince told the Guardian.

“This airplane had a Saudi flag on the tail. This plane came from the kingdom.”

A friend of Sultan said that a senior royal had called the prince on two or three occasions before he boarded the plane to reassure him.

“When Sultan decided to fly from Paris to Cairo, [the senior royal] said, ‘Don’t worry, we will arrange that for you’ and apparently he felt comfortable. But it was a big mistake.”

At the time of the alleged 2003 kidnapping, Sultan was at odds with the rest of his family over his reform agenda for the kingdom.

From early 2002 he repeatedly shocked the Saudi establishment with a succession of public calls for more political participation, accountability, transparency and judicial reform.

Then in May 2003, rather than submitting to demands to tone down his criticism, Sultan announced that he would hold a conference in Geneva to reveal details of corruption at the Ministry of Defence. 

Sultan alleges he was kidnapped the following month.

The investigation into the case is ongoing and there have as yet been no charges lodged.

Middle East Eye's requests for information about the current whereabouts of Prince Sultan were not answered by the Saudi government.