The Criminal Court in Jeddah has sentenced a former security officer to a year in jail for blackmail. The court found the man guilty of blackmailing a woman and demanding sex to help her case.

The woman presented to the court a recoding of the man, who was working in the civil rights administration. He asked the plaintiff, who was in debt, to have a relationship with him in return for his help delaying her liability. The blackmailer promised the woman that if she gave in to his demands, he would ask a committee to make the payment on her behalf.

The court accepted the recordings as evidence.It had earlier asked members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (Haia) to attend court and give their testimony.

The Haia members were the ones to formally accuse the defendant after the 30-year-old married woman complained that he had blackmailed her through phone calls and text messages. The plaintiff claimed that he would help her avoid jail because of her debt, if she would do as told.

The court confronted the accused with the blackmail recordings in a hearing session, in which the recordings were presented as proof for the accusation. In one of the recordings, the man can be heard demanding a meeting in an apartment. The accused denied parts of the tape and confessed to others.

The accused denied all accusations against him, adding that he acted in an unprofessional way but his intentions, he claimed, were only to help the woman.

 
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