COLOMBO — Saudi Arabia’s Supreme Court has overturned the death sentence given to a Sri Lankan man over a Facebook comment about the Prophet Muhammad, Sri Lanka’s deputy foreign minister said on Wednesday.
Arun Hemachandra announced the decision in a Facebook post, Middle East Eye reported, and thanked Riyadh for agreeing to commute the sentence. The man, Anojan Sivarasa, remains in prison, and nothing in the announcement says when he might be released.
The outlet also set out how the case began. Sivarasa answered another user’s derogatory comment about a Hindu deity by insulting the Prophet in a comment thread. He deleted it and posted an apology video, but a screenshot reached his employer and Saudi officials, and he was arrested in July. The Al-Ahsa Criminal Court sentenced him to five years in prison and a fine of 3 million riyals, about $800,000. A death sentence followed last month. Reports differ on his age: Middle East Eye gives 27, and some other accounts 24.
What has changed is the penalty, and the Middle East Eye report says little about how. It does not give the date of the ruling, the legal grounds for overturning the sentence, or what replaces it. Hemachandra’s own word was “commute,” which implies a lesser punishment still to be fixed. It is also unclear whether the five-year term and the 3 million riyal fine still stand.
The reversal matters beyond one family: it lifts a death sentence imposed over an online comment that its author deleted and apologised for on video. The announcement came from Colombo, with thanks to Riyadh, not from a Saudi court statement, so the court’s own account is still awaited.
The Arab world’s wider direction on capital punishment is not uniform. Lebanon became the first Arab nation to abolish the death penalty in August, as TEH reported, sparing 85 people on death row. Saudi Arabia has not moved that way, and this ruling does not change its law.
The case leaves questions that only Riyadh can answer: what the Supreme Court found, what Sivarasa’s new sentence will be, and whether the fine will be waived. A man who spent weeks under a death sentence for a deleted comment is now waiting to learn what he is sentenced to instead.
