Kuwait: After Three Months in Prison, Court Releases Twitter User

Three months ago, with sectarianism reaching its climax in the public sphere after the Bahraini protests, a Kuwaiti Twitter user named Nasser Abul (@NasserAbuL) was arrested for insulting the Bahraini and Saudi regimes.

At first, many people thought arresting Abul was caused by his sectarian tweets, which he wrote to express his anger towards what is happening to adherents of the Shia sect in Bahrain; however, that was not the only charge. Abul spent three months between the state security police and the central jail and his court sessions were postponed several times. Finally, the court decided to release Abul after sentencing him to three months, which he had already served, for insulting the Sunni sect.

This decision came weeks after the sentencing of a Sunni tweep called Mubarak Al-Bathali (@mubaark) to three years in jail for insulting a religious sect and trying to “hurt national unity”. Al-Bathali, unlike Abul, did not try to deny what he wrote on Twitter. The sentence was later shortened to six months in jail.

Kuwaiti mainstream media has not been transparent about the details of Abul's case and what is generally assured is that he denied writing his tweets, saying that someone hacked into his account and tweeted the controversial posts.

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