Two Canadian brothers held in Saudi Arabia in connection to a schoolyard brawl that left one youth dead fear they could be executed for a crime they say they didn't commit, according to a newspaper report.
Mohamed Kohail, 22, and his 16-year-old brother Sultan -- both of Palestinian descent -- say they were coerced into confessing their guilt for the murder of a Syrian youth last January.
Sultan, who was attending a school popular among non-Saudi Arabs in Jeddah, had been threatened by a group of school peers after being accused of insulting a Syrian girl.
Kohail and another friend came to the school to defend Sultan from the threats, which included that he was going to be kidnapped.
There are different versions as to what exactly happened next.
According to one Arabic newspaper, Okaz, a brawl erupted between a group of Palestinians and Syrians.
"As the physical attack intensified, one of the Palestinians grabbed a Syrian boy named Monther, punched him violently and hit his head against the school yard fence. Monther fell on the ground and died instantly," said the newspaper. The dead youth has since been identified as Munzer Haraki.
In an exclusive interview with The Globe and Mail, via a cellphone from inside a Saudi prison, Kohail said Saudi police forced him to confess to punching the Syrian boy.
"I didn't touch anyone. There were 13 people who were beating me up. ... They used knives and sticks and bricks," he told the newspaper.
Kohail claims he suffered injuries to his shoulder, ribs and eyes, and broke his front teeth in the brawl.
Kohail said police arrested him as he was being treated at hospital and transferred him to Salamah police station, where they beat him into a confession.
"There was a policeman who told me, you have to sign, because if you sign the papers, you will get out" of prison.
Kohail said the policeman originally told him he risked little because the Syrian boy was still alive but after signing the confession, the man said the boy had died and that he was going to be charged with murder.
Now, after four months in jail, he fears that he will be killed.
"It's going to be death for now. That is what the investigators asked from the court," Kohail told The Globe.
"I'm afraid of everything," he continued in accented English. "I really want to go back to Canada now. I like everything in Canada."
Sultan, who reportedly suffered a broken leg while in Saudi custody, is currently being held in a youth detention centre.
The boys' father, Ali, told The Globe he is convinced that both his sons are "100 per cent" innocent.
Until last year, Kohail was attending Montreal's Concordia University and lived with his family in the West Island suburb of Dollard-des-Ormeaux.
The family returned to Saudi Arabia when Kohail's older sister became ill. As the Kohails are Palestinian, they never received Saudi citizenship even though all of the children were born there.
In 2005, they were all granted Canadian citizenship.
The Foreign Affairs Department in Ottawa has confirmed "the arrest of two Canadian citizens in Saudi Arabia" and said that officials have been granted access.
The death penalty is still used in Saudi Arabia with at least 40 executions carried out this year, Christoph Wilcke, a researcher with Human Rights Watch, told The Globe.
In 2000, William Sampson, a Canadian marketing consultant, was tortured in a Saudi jail for more than two years and forced to confess to a series of deadly car bombings that he did not commit.
He was released in 2003 but the incident chilled relations between the two countries.
