Alkarama has submitted his case to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the UN Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID), emphasising the likelihood of torture as of result of Abdul Hakim Gellani's disappearance.
Abdul Hakim Gellani, 43, was born in Mogadishu of Yemeni parents and currently lives with his family in London. He lived in the UAE until his late teens and then moved to the United Kingdom in 1981, where he eventually acquired British citizenship.He is currently the director of a travel agency specializing in organizing pilgrimages to Mecca.
2005 arrest and imprisonment
During a visit to Mecca in 2005 as a part of a pilgrimage he had organized, Abdul Hakim Gellani was arrested by Saudi intelligence services at a hotel on 19 November 2005, and was severely tortured during three months detention. Following an intervention by the British consulate, the tortured stopped, however he remained in custody.
In May 2006, Abdul Hakim Gellani began a hunger strike in protest of his continued unlawful detention, in the hopes that he would be released or at least put on trial. He was eventually released on 19 July 2006 despite never have been read the charges against him or having appeared before a judge.
Passport scandal
Following his release, Saudi authorities claimed that after "losing his passport" (which was in fact confiscated at the time of his 2005 arrest), he was prohibited from leaving the country. He finally obtained a new passport from the British Consulate in Jeddah, however the authorities once again confiscated his passport.
Saudi authorities deny arrest
Abdul Hakim Gellani was unable to leave Saudi Arabia up until his most recent arrest in early August 2007. His wife has tried contacting the Saudi authorities by phone, and also hired a London-based lawyer in an attempt to locate her husband. The authorities have categorically denied any knowledge of his arrest, stating that he "has not been arrested and was not being detained". She is particularly worried with the present situation, because in the case of his first arrest in 2005, the Saudis informed her that he had remanded in custody.
Abdul Hakim Gellan is undoubtedly a victim of enforced disappearance as defined by Article 2 of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons against Enforced Disappearance, which considers an "enforced disappearance" to "be the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law."
Given the serious risks run by incommunicado detention, Alkarama requests the urgent intervention of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights with the Saudi authorities on behalf of Abdul Hakim Gellani.