ASSAAD ABBOUD, Cairo | Thursday
AN Egyptian court has sentenced a Saudi princess to three years’ hard labour in her absence on for a million-dollar jewel theft, in yet another brush with the law for her Cairo-based family.
Central Cairo’s Abul Ela correctional court announced that it had also handed three years’ hard labour to Princess Hind al-Fassi’s Lebanese cook, Samer Mokaled, and two years to her secretary, Ahmed Awwad, for the crime.
The sister-in-law of Saudi King Fahd, who lives on the top two floors of Cairo’s luxury Ramses Hilton hotel with her husband Prince Turki bin Abdel Aziz, has consistently ignored summonses by the court.
The court heard how the princess, the daughter of an Egyptian father and Moroccan mother, had previously been expelled from Saudi Arabia as well as from Tunisia where she allegedly committed a similar crime.
None of the defendants, all of whom have been barred from leaving the country, turned up to hear the verdict.
The owners of a Cairo jewellery store filed suit against the princess in January, alleging the cook had disappeared with a sample of jewels worth $1.3m for his employer to choose from.
Mokaled told the police he handed the jewels over to the princess, aged around 40, but the jewellers have still not received payment or the returned jewels.
They demanded $2.5m in compensation in their lawsuit. Under Egyptian law, an arrest warrant for the princess and her accomplices will be issued if they do not surrender themselves in the wake of the judgement. Having been sentenced in their absence, they would then have the right to seek a re-trial and the original convictions would be set aside.
Princess Hind’s husband Prince Turki, a brother of King Fahd and who is fourth in the line to the Saudi throne, is also no stranger to the Cairo legal system. Complaints were filed against him in 1998 by Egyptian and Filipino employees accusing him of holding them against their will.
In September 1999 two nephews of the prince, Fahd and Turk al-Fassi, were sentenced to prison terms for beating up a policeman at the Ramses Hilton while prince Turki’s bodyguard was sentenced to jail in a separate case for beating and injuring a cook at the same hotel. – AFP