JEDDAH – The Jeddah General Court will deliver next Tuesday verdict on a drug smuggling case involving Egyptian lawyer Ahmed Al-Jizawi. When the court held its final hearing into the case on Wednesday, the judge read out the legally endorsed confessions of Al-Jizawi, the first defendant in the case, and asked whether he had anything to say about them. In his reply, Al-Jizawi denied the confessions saying that they had been made under duress and he was physically coerced. Al-Jizawi was arrested at Jeddah's King Abdulaziz International Airport in April this year while allegedly attempting to smuggle narcotic pills into the Kingdom. Al-Jizawi was caught with 21,380 Xanax tablets, a controlled medicine containing alprazolam that is classified by Saudi authorities as a narcotic and is sold only under prescription. The pills were stashed inside baby powder containers and wooden boxes alongside copies of the Holy Qur'an. The judge noted that court documents indicate that endorsement of confessions was made in front of the three-member panel of judges. Al-Jizawi said he was subjected to fingerprinting but was unaware that this was to endorse his confessions legally. At this time, the judge asked him to produce evidence to vindicate his claim that the confessions had been made under coercion. The defendant said the marks on his body was substantial evidence. Al-Jizawi testified that a piece of baggage that contained his laptop with research documents worth billions of riyals was missing. The judge found contradictions in his statements when he sought clarifications about the baggage. Refuting the defendant's claim, the public prosecutor said the data might be terrorism-related. The second defendant, an Egyptian, backtracked from an earlier confession that his Saudi employer, the third defendant, was innocent of any charges of smuggling narcotics into the Kingdom. The Egyptian said his confessions were not correct and that he came to Riyadh to receive his mother and not to take a delivery of narcotic pills from Al-Jizawi. The Egyptian, who worked as a driver for the Saudi man, admitted in an earlier hearing that he wrongly implicated his former Saudi employer in the case to settle a score he had with him. He originally said he lied during investigations to implicate the Saudi. He said the reason was that his former employer had informed police that he had embezzled SR130,000 and siphoned it off to Egypt while working as his driver. During investigations, the second defendant was revealed as an associate of Al-Jizawi in the drug deal. He was arrested while smuggling narcotics from Cairo into the Kingdom. Customs officers had seized a total of 3,034 narcotic pills from his baggage.
