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Torture and Survival in a Saudi Prison: William Sampson Recounts his 2 1/2 Year Ordeal, Calls Torture "Morally Wrong, a Political Mistake" and Useless for Intelligence Gathering

Five years ago this month, car bombings in Saudi Arabia killed two British nationals and wounded two others. Most of the targeted were working as foreign engineers in the country. The bombings set off another nightmare for several of their colleagues, who were accused by the Saudi government of carrying out the attacks.

One of them was William Sampson. Sampson, a Canadian citizen, was working as a consultant in the Saudi Arabian pharmaceutical industry. Within weeks of the bombings, he was imprisoned along with seven others and placed in solitary confinement.

Sampson remained in jail for over two and a half years, where he says he was tortured, beaten, and sexually assaulted. Medical tests subsequently backed up his claims.

In February 2001, after weeks of torture, Sampson appeared on Saudi Arabian television and confessed to the bombings. He later claimed he had endured torture so painful in prior weeks he had begged his captors to let him confess.

The televised confession elicited a world-wide campaign to secure his release. Sampson's case was taken up by the Association In Defense of the Wrongfully Convicted, and championed by prominent advocates such as the late attorney Johnnie Cochran and wrongfully imprisoned former boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter. Under mounting international pressure, the Saudi government granted him clemency. In August 2003, Sampson and five others were set free.

Since his release, Sampson has initiated legal proceedings against the Saudi government. He's also written a book about his ordeal -- "Confessions of an Innocent Man: Torture and Survival in a Saudi Prison."

• William Sampson, arrested and held in a Saudi jail for almost 3 years where he was tortured into confessing to crimes he did not commit. He is the author of the new book "Confessions of an Innocent Man: Torture and Survival in a Saudi Prison."

AMY GOODMAN: William Sampson joins us in our Firehouse studio. Welcome to Democracy Now!

WILLIAM SAMPSON: Thank you for inviting me.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us about the day you were arrested.

WILLIAM SAMPSON: Well, it started off as a normal but stressful day. I got up in the morning, made myself coffee, ran out of my house, late as always.

AMY GOODMAN: Why were you in Saudi Arabia?

WILLIAM SAMPSON: I was in Saudi Arabia working as a consultant for the Saudi Industrial Development Fund, which is a government development bank. I was there as a marketing consultant, reviewing project proposals by startup industry in Saudi Arabia.

AMY GOODMAN: How long had you been there?

WILLIAM SAMPSON: About two-and-a-half years at the time of my arrest. And as I said, I ran out the front door, saw that there was a flat tire on my car, turned to get a taxi. And I saw another car pull up and almost run me over. A couple of individuals jumped out of it, stripped my possessions off me, a third got out of the car, waved a gun at me, and the next thing I knew, I was on my way to a Saudi Arabian prison.

AMY GOODMAN: And then what happened?

WILLIAM SAMPSON: When I first arrived at the prison, I was chained to the door of my cell, chained upright in the door of my cell and assigned an initial number. I think it was 23 or 26 at the time. And I stood in that position for about an hour or so before I was taken up for my first interrogation session. During that session, I was beaten and punched and asked various questions about what I had been doing in the proceeding weeks, specifically around about the times of two bombings, one that occurred November the 17th, one that had occurred on November the 22nd of 2000, and also about a bombing that had occurred only two days previously on December the 15th of 2000. And as I said, I answered those questions in between --

AMY GOODMAN: These were all bombings of cars?

WILLIAM SAMPSON: These were all bombings. Yes. The first bombing that occurred on November the 17th was on the car of a British national called Christopher Rodway, which killed Christopher Rodway and injured his wife.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you know him?

WILLIAM SAMPSON: I didn't know him, but I had a friend who knew him, who worked in the same department at the military hospital in Riyadh. On the night of the second bombing, November 22, a car with four British expatriates – well, three British and one Irish expatriate -- were driving on the way to a party at one of the sort of western residential compounds in Riyadh, and a friend of mine was in the car immediately behind them following them to that party. A bomb went off, and that one injured the occupants and almost, but not quite, killed -- severely injured a chap called Mark Paine. If my friend, Raf Schyvens, who was following the vehicle had not been there, the severely injured party, Mark Paine, would possibly have bled to death. Raf, being a trauma nurse, actually stopped and rendered first aid assistance until the emergency services were actually able to take up the slack. For his pains, Raf was subsequently arrested and tortured, much as I was.

AMY GOODMAN: For how long?

WILLIAM SAMPSON: He was in prison for a week longer than myself. So, I was in for 964 days. He was in for 971.

AMY GOODMAN: And he had already been arrested at the time of your arrest?

WILLIAM SAMPSON: Yes. He would have been arrested about a week before me, and what had happened was after the second bombing had gone off, all of the witnesses to the bombing were questioned by the police. And they were asked lots of odd questions, like all the names of people they knew and all of the relationships with all the other Westerners. And Raf was the last of them to actually be questioned. And during his initial questioning sessions, they kept making statements at him that they knew he was the bomber. But they released him. So he just assumed, we all assumed, that those were just sort of threats to unsettle him.

The next thing happened was that about a week before my arrest, about September the 10th, he just disappeared. I had phoned -- I had been intending to actually meet him that day. I phoned him from my work, just before leaving work, and just by chance got him on his cell phone at the time his villa was being searched by the secret police, and he was being arrested. And from that moment on, for the next week, I spent my time chasing around all the contacts I had at various police stations, trying to find out where he might be, until I eventually got told to back off, because where he was was somewhere I wasn't going to find.

And so, when that car pulled up about seven days after he disappeared, when that car pulled up in front of me, I knew they were coming for me, because it was just standard. I was a friend of Raf’s. They had arrested Raf Schyvens, were going to pin the bombing on him, at least the second bombing on him. I was a friend of Raf's. I was also known to the secret police or to the intelligence -- Ministry of Interior intelligence people, because I had been involved in assisting a number of Westerners on different occasions with difficulties they had at police stations over infringements of alcohol laws or socializing laws that they have in Saudi Arabia. It is, for example, illegal for the conversation that is taking place to happen out there. I'm not married to you. You're not related to me. I can’t be technically in your presence socially, and I can be arrested for that, and so can you. And these types of minor infringements, Alexander Mitchell and myself had been involved in smoothing over the process at the police station so that the paperwork didn't get too sticky for most people.

With that on our background, and we obviously seemed to fit the frame, and on December the 17th, I disappeared, as I found myself in this police cell, and there the beatings started from the very, very start. Within a couple of days, the beatings had progressed from just punching, kicking, being thrown around the room, having my testicles stood on, to being lain down on the floor in a hog-tied position, hands shackled behind my back and attached to my ankles, and then beaten over the soles of the feet. And this then followed on to something called falanga, where you are strapped over a metal bar and hung upside-down off the floor so that your feet and buttocks are prominently exposed, and then you are beaten across the soles off the feet, across the buttock, and then every once in a while I would have a quick shot into my scrotum. The damage that was done there, I mean, within a few days of that, I literally had testicles the size of oranges. And my feet were swollen. I discovered I was just a tapestry of bruises.