A Saudi Arabian princess who had an illegitimate child with a British man has secretly been granted asylum in this country after she claimed she would face the death penalty if she were forced to return home. The young woman, who has been granted anonymity by the courts, won her claim for refugee status after telling a judge that her adulterous affair made her liable to death by stoning.
Her case is one of a small number of claims for asylum brought by citizens of Saudi Arabia which are not openly acknowledged by either government. British diplomats believe that to do so would in effect be to highlight the persecution of women in Saudi Arabia, which would be viewed as open criticism of the House of Saud and lead to embarrassing publicity for both governments.
The woman, who comes from a very wealthy Saudi family, says she met her English boyfriend – who is not a Muslim – during a visit to London. They struck up a relationship
She became pregnant the following year and worried that her elderly husband – a member of the Royal Family of Saudi Arabia – had become suspicious of her behaviour, she persuaded him to let her visit the UK again to give birth in secret. She feared for her life if she returned to Saudi Arabia.
She persuaded the court that if she returned to the Gulf state she and her child would be subject to capital punishment under Sharia law – specifically flogging and stoning to death. She was also worried about the possibility of an honour killing.
Since she fled Saudi Arabia, her family and her husband's family have broken off contact with her.
The woman has been granted permanent leave to remain in the UK after the Immigration and Asylum tribunal allowed her appeal.
The Home Office yesterday declined to discuss the case. A spokesman for the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia in London said that he would call back but subsequently became unavailable.
Relations between the UK and Saudi Arabia have been strained in recent years and were brought to a head in 2006 when Tony Blair intervened to end a Serious Fraud Office (SFO) inquiry into alleged kickbacks paid in a multibillion military aircraft deal between the two states.
The Saudi royal family was deeply concerned about the idea that the investigators might try o open up their Swiss bank accounts, it was alleged at the time.
This led the Saudis to threaten to restrict the sharing of intelligence relating to terror activity if the prosecution went ahead. They also threatened to pull out of other highly-lucrative arms deals.
Last year, the House of Lords ruled that the SFO's decision to drop the corruption investigation into the £43bn Saudi arms deal with BAE Systems was unlawful.
In a hard-hitting ruling, two High Court judges described the SFO's decision as "an outrage".
One of them, Lord Justice Moses, said the SFO and the Government had given into "blatant threats" that Saudi intelligence co-operation would end unless the probe into corruption was halted.
"No one, whether within this country or outside, is entitled to interfere with the course of our justice," he said. "It is the failure of government and the defendant to bear that essential principle in mind that justifies the intervention of this court."
The Middle East state has been shrouded in controversy over oppressive policies against women and homosexuals. Secrecy surrounds much of the Saudi legal system, but in a recent report on the use of the death penalty in the kingdom, the human rights group Amnesty International highlighted its extensive use against men and women.
Adulterers face public stonings and floggings and, in the most serious cases, beheadings and hangings.
The high numbers of executions in Saudi Arabia in 2007 continued into 2008. There were at least 102 executions of men and women last year – at an average rate of two every week. Amnesty is aware of at least 136 individuals currently awaiting execution.
Last week, Saudi Arabia's religious police were blamed for the death of two sisters who were murdered in what was deemed an "honour killing" by their brother, after the sisters were arrested for allegedly mixing with men to whom they were not related.
The Society for Defending Women's Rights in Saudi Arabia said that the religious police had arrested the two sisters, aged 19 and 21, thus putting their lives in danger.
Their brother shot them dead in front of their father when they left a women's shelter in Riyadh on 5 July, according to Saudi news reports.
In 2007, in a case that shocked Saudis, a woman from Qatif was sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in prison after being gang-raped. She offended cultural expectations because she was unaccompanied when she got into a car with a former boyfriend.
The man had agreed to hand back a photograph of the woman who was about to marry another man, but as they drove along a street they were stopped and seized by seven men who raped them both. The woman was originally sentenced to 90 lashes but the sentence was increased when she appealed. Eventually, after an international outcry, she was pardoned.
In 2007, King Abdullah II of Saudi Arabia was jeered during a state visit to Britain as dozens of demonstrators turned out to protest at his country's human rights record.
src: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/princess-facing-saudi-death-penalty-given-secret-uk-asylum-1753007.html

WASHINGTON - The American soldier who went missing June 30 from his base in eastern Afghanistan and was later confirmed to have been captured, appeared on a video posted Saturday to a Web site by the Taliban.
Two U.S. defense officials confirmed to The Associated Press that the man in the video is the captured soldier. The video provides the first glimpse the public has had of the missing soldier.

The soldier is shown in the 28-minute video with his head shaved and the start of a beard. He is sitting and dressed in a nondescript, gray outfit. Early in the video one of his captors holds the soldier's dog tag up to the camera. His name and ID number are clearly visible. He is shown eating at one point and sitting cross-legged.
The soldier, whose identity has not yet been released by the Pentagon pending notification of members of Congress and the soldier's family, says his name, age and hometown on the video, which was released Saturday on a Web site pointed out by the Taliban.
The soldier said the date is July 14. He says he was captured when he lagged behind on a patrol.
He is interviewed in English by his captors, and he is asked his views on the war, which he calls extremely hard, his desire to learn more about Islam and the morale of American soldiers, which he said was low.
‘Well I’m scared’Asked how he was doing, the soldier said on the video:
"Well I'm scared, scared I won't be able to go home. It is very unnerving to be a prisoner."
He begins to answer questions in a matter-of-fact and sober voice, occasionally facing the camera, looking down and sometimes looking to the questioner on his left.
He later chokes up when discussing his family and his hope to marry his girlfriend.
"I have my girlfriend, who is hoping to marry," he said. "I have a very, very good family that I love back home in America. And I miss them every day when I'm gone. I miss them and I'm afraid that I might not ever see them again and that I'll never be able to tell them that I love them again and I'll never be able to hug them."
He is also prompted by his interrogators to give a message to the American people.
"To my fellow Americans who have loved ones over here, who know what it's like to miss them, you have the power to make our government bring them home," he said. "Please, please bring us home so that we can be back where we belong and not over here, wasting our time and our lives and our precious life that we could be using back in our own country. Please bring us home. It is America and American people who have that power."
The video is not a continuous recording — it appears to stop and start during the questioning.
It is unclear from the video whether the July 14 date is authentic. The soldier says that he heard that a Chinook helicopter carrying 37 NATO troops had been shot down over Helmand. A helicopter was shot down in southern Afghanistan on July 14, but it was carrying civilians on a reported humanitarian mission for NATO forces. All six Ukrainian passengers died in the crash, and a child on the ground was killed.
Details on disappearance unclearOn July 2, the U.S. military said an American soldier had disappeared after walking off his base in eastern Afghanistan with three Afghan counterparts and was believed to have been taken prisoner. A U.S. defense official said the soldier was noticed missing during a routine check of the unit on June 30 and was first listed as "duty status whereabouts unknown."
Details of such incidents are routinely held very tightly by the military as it works to retrieve a missing or captured soldier without giving away any information to captors.
But Afghan Police Gen. Nabi Mullakheil said the soldier went missing in eastern Paktika province near the border with Pakistan from an American base. The region is known to be Taliban-infested.
The most important insurgent group operating in that area is known as Haqqani network and is led by warlord Siraj Haqqani, whom the U.S. has accused of masterminding beheadings and suicide bombings including the July 2008 attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul that killed some 60 people. The Haqqani group also was linked to an assassination attempt on Afghan president Hamid Karzai early last year.
On Saturday, a U.S. military official in Kabul, Col. Greg Julian, said the U.S. was "still doing everything we can to return him safely."
Julian said U.S. troops had distributed two fliers in the area where the soldier disappeared. One of them asked for information on the missing soldier and offered a $25,000 reward for his return. The other said "please return our soldier safely" or "we will hunt you," according to Julian.

President Barack Obama, annoyed by a fly during a television interview at the White House, took matters into his own hands by killing it.Mr Obama told the persistent fly: “Get out of here.”It did not. So Mr Obama waited for the fly to settle and then smacked the fly dead at the first attempt.Without missing a beat, the president said to CNBC correspondent John Harwood: “Now, where were we. That was pretty impressive, wasn’t it? I got the sucker.”The camera crew was still rolling in the East Room. Mr Obama pointed to the vanquished insect on the floor and said: “You want to film that?”

June 13 (Bloomberg) -- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who heightened tensions with the West during his first four years in power, was set for a second term after he took an insurmountable lead in election vote counting.
Ahmadinejad, 52, took 64 percent of the vote in yesterday’s presidential poll, compared with 32.6 percent for his main rival, former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, with 78 percent of the votes counted, state television cited the Interior Ministry as saying. Shortly after polling closed Mousavi, 67, claimed he was the winner and warned that he would “follow up” to investigate any fraudulent voting.
An Ahmadinejad victory over rivals who favored warmer relations with the U.S. will hinder efforts by President Barack Obama to resolve the West’s dispute with the Persian Gulf nation over its nuclear program. The U.S. and several major allies including Israel say the program is a cover for the development of a weapon. The government in Tehran denies the charge, insisting the program is peaceful and designed to generate electricity.
Ahmadinejad’s re-election is “a major obstacle to U.S.- Iran confidence building,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“He pushes the worst possible buttons; his diatribes toward Israel and his Holocaust denial make it far more difficult for any U.S. administration to acquiesce on enrichment of uranium” in Iran, Sadjadpour said.
Tehran Clashes
Police clashed today with Mousavi supporters in Tehran, Agence France-Presse reported. “They have ruined the country and they want to ruin it more over the next four years,” shouted the crowd as policemen beat protesters with batons outside Mousavi’s campaign office, the news wire reported.
Mohammad Sahadatfar, a spokesman for Ahmadinejad’s campaign office in Tehran, said in a telephone interview he was not surprised by the vote.
“We had expected these results,” Sahadatfar said. Ahmadinejad’s last address on state television on June 10 “was instrumental in securing the votes. He stated all the facts clearly and countered accusations of lies that opponents had made against him.”
‘Certainly Victorious’
The other two candidates in the race made little impression, according to the official results. Former Parliamentary Speaker Mehdi Karrubi, 71, got 0.9 percent of the vote, while 2.5 percent voted for Mohsen Rezai, 54, a former Revolutionary Guards commander who appealed to many of the same voters Ahmadinejad was courting.
About 35 million of the 46.2 million eligible voters cast their ballots yesterday, the Interior Ministry said. The incumbent needed more than 50 percent of the vote to avoid a second round run-off. There were no international monitors.
In a news conference held in Tehran after polls closed and before results were known, Mousavi’s campaign aides said he expected to capture 25 million votes.
“Based on reports from provinces, Mousavi will certainly be victorious with a large lead in this very first round,” Abolfazl Fateh, Mousavi’s campaign manager, said.
Iran is under three sets of United Nations sanctions over its refusal to halt uranium enrichment, a process that can generate fuel for a nuclear power reactor or a weapon. The country increased uranium production during the last three months and continued to stonewall inspectors investigating whether it is concealing a weapons program, the UN’s nuclear agency said on June 5.
Israel Tensions
Ahmadinejad has further worsened Iran’s relations with the West by questioning Israel’s right to exist and the extent of the Holocaust. His speech attacking Israel at an April 20 United Nations conference in Geneva prompted European delegates to walk out.
The government in Tehran has supported militant Islamist movements such as the Gaza Strip-based Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah. The U.S. also accused Iran of arming militant groups in neighboring Iraq that have killed American soldiers.
During the campaign, Karrubi and Mousavi accused Ahmadinejad of squandering years of rising crude oil prices through mismanagement that fueled an inflation rate that reached 24 percent in January and unemployment of 10.5 percent.
All three of Ahmadinejad’s challengers said that his flaunting of the country’s nuclear program and his confrontational rhetoric with the West backfired, with Iran starved of investment to boost crude oil production by U.S. and UN sanctions imposed because of its refusal to halt its nuclear work.
‘Nuclear Peaks’
Ahmadinejad made his defense of the nuclear program against international pressure one of the cornerstones of his campaign.
“The Iranian nation has reached the nuclear peaks,” Ahmadinejad said in a campaign rally in Tehran on May 22. “It has broken the chains of sanctions. In these four years, despite international pressure, the Iranian nation proved that it can progress. The path of the future is this very one.”
Ahmadinejad focused his campaign on buttressing support in the more religiously inclined rural areas where about a third of Iran’s 70 million people live. It was a constituency that helped secure his surprise victory four years ago on a promise to redistribute oil wealth. Since taking office in 2005, he has visited each of Iran’s 30 provinces twice.
The former Tehran mayor had expanded handouts to Iranians as the price of oil jumped from $60 a barrel to a high of $147 last July. Spending on subsidized products such as sugar, wheat and cooking oils rose more than 50 percent from 2005 to 2007.
Young People, Women
With oil now down to $72 a barrel, Iran -- holder of the second-largest oil reserves in the world after Saudi Arabia -- faces widening budget deficits, the International Monetary Fund has warned.
Mousavi, who is respected by many Iranians for steering the economy through the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war as prime minister, appealed mainly to the urban middle-class, young people and women. He was endorsed during the campaign by former President Ali Khatami, who dropped out of the contest to avoid taking votes away from Mousavi.
The former prime minister said he was open to talks with the U.S. that would ease three decades of hostility between the countries. He promised unspecified confidence-building measures to allay international concerns about the atomic program, though the nuclear effort would be continued.
‘New Possibilities’
President Obama had underlined yesterday his ambition to secure better relations with Iran.
“You’re seeing people looking at new possibilities,” Obama said in response to a question at the White House. “Whoever ends up winning the election in Iran, the fact that there’s been a robust debate hopefully will help advance our ability to engage them in new ways.”
Ahmadinejad had the implicit backing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 69. On May 18 Khamenei, who has the final say on all affairs of state, urged voters to shun candidates who might yield to “bullying Western powers.” Ahmadinejad supporters cited Khamenei’s call for a president who “understands the people’s woes.”
State institutions were deployed to silence critics. Several anti-Ahmadinejad newspapers were closed and bloggers arrested. On May 23, Iran temporarily blocked social networking. On May 23, Iran temporarily blocked social networking Web sites Facebook and Twitter, used in their campaigns by Mousavi and Karrubi.
A Mousavi presidency would have made “it easier from a public relations side for Obama,” said Alex Vatanka, a U.S- based expert on global security at Jane’s Information Group. “From the U.S. point of view, it is hard to stomach someone such as Ahmadinejad with his baggage and rhetoric on the Holocaust.”

CAIRO (Reuters) - President Barack Obama sought a "new beginning" between the United States and the Muslim world on Thursday but offered no new initiative to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, an omission likely to disappoint many.
"We meet at a time of tension between the United States and Muslims around the world -- tension rooted in historical forces that go beyond any current policy debate," the U.S. president said in a major speech at Cairo University.
"I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect," he said. "America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition."
Obama's speech was an effort to restore the tarnished U.S. image among many of the more than 1 billion Muslims around the world, damaged by former President George W. Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the treatment of U.S. military detainees.
It coincided with the release of new remarks by al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden aimed at trying to undermine his message.
Bin Laden told Muslims alliances with Christians and Jews would annul their faith and urged them to fight Western allies in Muslim countries.
The choice of Cairo for the speech underscored Obama's focus on the Middle East, where he faces huge foreign policy challenges, from trying to restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to curbing Iran's nuclear program.
Obama, who is hoping to build a coalition of Muslim government to back his diplomatic moves, offered no new proposals to advance the Middle East peace process, saying Palestinians "must abandon violence" and urging them acknowledge Israel's right to exist.
"The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements," he said. "This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop."
Before the speech, the U.S. president met Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
"We discussed how to move forward in a constructive way to bring peace and prosperity to people in the region," Obama told reporters after the talks with Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt since 1981 and kept a tight lid on opposition.
(Additional reporting by Cynthia Johnston in Cairo and Zahra Hosseinian in Tehran; Writing by Edmund Blair; editing by Philippa Fletcher)

Obama will give a major policy talk at Cairo University on June 4, intended to start mending the rift between the United States and the Arab world. During the Bush years, many Arabs turned against the United States because of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Graib. But the issue that is really at the crux of the tensions with the United States is the intractable conflict between Israel and Palestine, and what many perceive as a one-sided U.S. policy in support of Israel.

The Obama administration has taken a positive stand on the Israeli settlements, calling for a complete freeze. “[Obama] wants to see a stop to settlements — not some settlements, not outposts, not ‘natural growth’ exceptions,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently told reporters.

But the administration has said almost nothing about the devastating Israeli invasion of Gaza that left over 1,300 dead, including some 400 children. To many in the Middle East, this is an unfortunate continuation of past policies that condemn the loss of innocent Israeli lives, but refuse to speak out against the disproportionately greater loss of Palestinian lives at the hands of the Israeli military.

The Israeli invasion of Gaza began on December 27, 2008, when Obama had just won the election but had not yet taken office. While he spoke out against the November 26 Mumbai terrorism attack, he refused to even call for a ceasefire in Gaza, saying coldly, “When it comes to foreign affairs it is particularly important to adhere to the principle of one president at a time."

Once inaugurated, Obama appointed George Mitchell as a special peace envoy and immediately sent him on a “listening tour” to key places in the Middle East—except Gaza. Mitchell returned for a second trip to the region in late February, visiting Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Israel and the West Bank but once again bypassing Gaza. The same thing happened on his third trip in April.

Hillary Clinton has never visited war-torn Gaza. She promised $300 million for rebuilding, but the aid won’t get to Gaza as long as the administration insists on dealing only with Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority in the West Bank while shunning Hamas, which controls Gaza and was democratically elected.

Obama won great support from the American people during the presidential campaign when he said that America must talk to its adversaries, without preconditions. But his administration now puts ridiculous conditions on talking to Hamas: It must recognize Israel, renounce violence and accept previous international agreements. Israel, on the other hand, does not have to recognize Palestine, renounce violence or abide by past agreements. Putting preconditions on just one side of the conflict makes it impossible to move a peace process forward.

While Obama prepares for his trip to the Middle East, more than 150 people—mostly Americans—are trying to enter war-torn Gaza through both the Egyptian and Israeli borders. Organized under the umbrella of the peace group CODEPINK, this is the largest group of Americans to travel to Gaza since the siege began.

The delegations, invited by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), are bringing medicines, toys, school supplies and playground building materials. An estimated 1,346 Gazan children were left without one or more of their parents as a result of the Israeli assault and the majority were left traumatized and depressed.

That’s why the peace group CODEPINK has launched an international petition (see www.codepinkalert.org) calling on Obama to visit Gaza and see for himself the devastation and deprivation that continues to plague the region’s 1.5 million people almost 6 months after the invasion. Just this week, Obama just tacked a new stop to his upcoming Middle Eastern visit: Saudi Arabia. If he can make room for a private dinner with the King, then surely he can find the time to go to Gaza. Isn't it more important for Obama to visit a region where 1,300 people have recently been killed and thousands of homes, schools and mosques destroyed? Isn't it more important for him to see how the Israelis are using the yearly $3 billion in military aid from U.S taxpayers?

Obama should take the opportunity, during this visit to Egypt next week, to visit Gaza. He should express his condolences for the loss of so many innocent lives, call for a lifting of the inhumane siege that continues to imprison an entire population, and support an investigation of how U.S. military funds to Israel are being spent.

Those actions, more than any fine words he may speak during his talk at Cairo University, will do wonders to repairs our relations with the Arab world that were so tattered during the Bush years.

In an audio file posted on jihadist Internet forums marking the fifth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion, al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri said that building Iraq as a "fortress of Islam" is the "most important duty" for Muslims."We will only get our rights back with our own hands and not through beggary or fraudulent elections," he said, according to a summary by the SITE monitoring service.In the nearly 16 minute audio message released Thursday, Zawahiri, known as Al-Qaeda's ideological thinker, called on Muslims to fight for creating a greater Muslim state, according to SITE.

It was Zawahiri's second audio file released this month. In the first, posted April 2, he launched a blistering attack on the United Nations."The United Nations is an enemy of Islam and Muslims: it is the one which codified and legitimized the setting up of the state of Israel and its taking over of the Muslims' lands," Zawahiri said in that recorded talk.Zawahiri's latest talk, titled "Five years after the Invasion of Iraq and Decades of Injustice by the Tyrants," contains references to U.S. Iraqi commander General David Petraeus's April 8 testimony to the U.S. Congress, and to a textile worker strike in Egypt on April 6 as evidence that it was a recent recording, according to SITE.The monitoring service said he called on Muslims to make Iraq a "fortress of Islam" and, underscoring the Sunni Muslim orientation of al-Qaeda, he referred to a plot against Iraq by the United States together with Shiite Iran, which he said would lead to the Mideast region exploding.He also discussed the situation in Egypt, saying that Muslims there are deprived of wealth and basic necessities, according to SITE.

Moscow has no information that Iran is trying to build a nuclear bomb, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said.
But he said the Kremlin shared the West's concern that Tehran's nuclear programme should be "transparent".
Mr Putin was speaking after talks in Moscow with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who said the two countries had made progress on the Iran issue.
Iran denies accusations that it is seeking to build a nuclear bomb, saying its programme is for civilian use.
"We do not have data that says Iran is trying to produce nuclear weapons," Mr Putin said at a joint news conference with Mr Sarkozy.
"Therefore we proceed from a position that Iran has no such plans but we share the concern of our partners that all programmes should be as transparent as possible," the Russian leader added.
Kosovo issue
Mr Sarkozy, for his part, said Paris and Moscow had made progress towards resolving differences over Iran.
He said their positions were moving "towards the same path", but gave no details.
Mr Sarkozy has been pushing for tougher sanctions against Tehran but Russia has opposed the move. Mr Putin is due to visit Iran next week.
Mr Sarkozy said earlier that the two leaders had also bridged differences over Kosovo's future status.
Russia is fiercely opposed to independence for Serbia's breakaway province, while France - along with other Western nations - supports it.
There was also a reminder of European concerns about Russia's human rights record, the BBC's James Rodgers in Moscow says.
Mr Sarkozy confirmed that he would meet members of a group critical of the situation in Chechnya, our correspondent says (BBC news)