Student at centre of new Saudi scandal
US prosecutor believes student accused of killing a teenage girl was whisked out of the country by kingdom’s officials
Shawn Overstreet, a prosecutor in Portland, Oregon, received the alert by surprise at the end of a weekend.
The GPS device worn by a 21-yearold student awaiting a trial on a manslaughter charge had been cut near a sand and gravel facility in town.
The student, Abdulrahman Sameer Noorah, a Saudi Arabian national living in the United States on a government scholarship, had asked the sheriff’s deputy who was monitoring him on supervised house arrest if he could go to the community college he was attending to study for upcoming exams. She had said yes.
Now she was reaching out to Overstreet to let him know what had happened. Overstreet’s first thought was that Noorah had killed himself.
But a search of the site with a cadaver dog had found only the monitoring device. And surveillance footage that investigators pulled from nearby showed a black SUV driving up a street near the quarry and then leaving soon afterward, at the time the bracelet was cut, Overstreet said.
About a year later, the Saudi Government confirmed what Overstreet had feared, that Noorah had made it out of the US and back to Saudi Arabia, despite having no passport. Overstreet has developed a working theory: Noorah escaped with the help of the Saudi Government.
The unusual case has drawn wide attention since it was reported by the
Oregonian last week. Amid simmering international anger over the killing of
Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in October, Noorah’s case, if the Saudi connection is proved, would be another illustration of the impunity with which Saudi Arabia seems to act around the world.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman has come under growing international pressure over Khashoggi’s brutal murder.
“I’ve had people cut their GPS bracelets — that happens all the time, a pair of scissors,” Overstreet said. “But those are people that stick around, they don’t really go anywhere . . . I’ve never had a foreign individual commit such a heinous crime and then take off.”
The case began on a hot summer day in August 2016 when a 15-yearold girl, Fallon Smart, was struck by a speeding car as she crossed the street in a densely populated part of Portland. Overstreet said that investigators determined the car was moving at 114km/h about a block away from the crash, and a crash reconstruction put the speed at the time of impact at 88.5km/h to 96.5km/h. The car had been moving through traffic on the street, which has a 40km/h speed limit, in the middle turn lane, Overstreet said. Noorah was charged as the driver.
Smart was struck by the right passenger side of the car; her head hit the windshield.
“It was a severe impact,” Overstreet said. “It broke the windshield in. Noorah had a passenger and that guy had blood and glass [on him]. She was thrown quite a distance.”
The car sped off after the impact, but its licence plate had fallen off at the scene, Overstreet said. The car returned to the scene, where Noorah was questioned by police.
His demeanour disturbed officers and witnesses at the scene, according to Overstreet, who was summoned to the scene.
“He stopped and got out and didn’t walk up to where Fallon was in the road. And then somebody yelled at him, and all he said was, ‘Is she dead’? And the woman who was yelling at him basically said, ‘Yes, you idiot, you killed her’, and he stood there,” Overstreet said.
“When I got there, I saw him, and I was very bothered by his demeanour, just because he was like, ‘Okay, can I go home now’?”
Noorah was charged with manslaughter, hit-and-run and reckless driving. His bail was initially set at around US$250,000 ($372,500), meaning he could get out after posting 10 per cent, or about US$25,000, under Oregon laws on pretrial release. But a judge later raised the bail to about US$1 million. Overstreet said he was still concerned about Noorah as a flight risk; the Saudi Government had put up the bail money, Overstreet said.
“Shortly after that was done, the attorneys showed up with a US$100,000 cheque from the Saudi Government,” Overstreet said. “I saw that cheque and I thought, ‘Uh oh, here we go; he’s going to be gone’.”
Noorah was put on GPS monitoring, meaning he was confined to his home and only allowed to go to mosque and to school. Noorah’s passport was also confiscated, Overstreet said.
The charge of first-degree manslaughter that Noorah faced meant that prosecutors believed Noorah had acted with “extreme indifference to the value of human life”. If convicted on the charge, he would have faced a mandatory minimum of 10 years in prison.
Prosecutors offered Noorah a deal: Plead guilty to second-degree manslaughter for a mandatory minimum sentence of six years and three months.
Overstreet said he thinks this was a turning point, when it might have become clear that Noorah was likely to face significant prison time.
He thinks his office’s case was robust; prosecutors had 20 eyewitnesses from some 50 people who were in the area at the time of the accident, as well as video evidence, he said.
Overstreet said he doesn’t have any definitive evidence that Saudi officials helped Noorah escape.
Investigators lost track of the SUV on video at some point after it left the quarry. The road on which it was travelling connects directly with Interstate 205, which heads to Portland’s airport to the north.
US marshals have traced the SUV’s origin to the airport, Aaron Pfenning, a deputy in Oregon, said. He said the Marshals Service thinks it is connected to a car service or rental company.
Noorah was back in Saudi Arabia seven days after the day the bracelet was cut, Pfenning said. But officials didn’t know that at the time. It was only about a year after Noorah’s June 2017 disappearance that Saudi officials told investigators with the Department of Homeland Security, which had made contact with them, that he was back in his home country, Pfenning said.
“All other requests for more info to Saudi officials have gone unanswered,” he said.
Overstreet says he believes that Noorah was issued a new passport with a different name.
Pfenning said the marshals think Noorah boarded a flight back to Saudi Arabia but do not know how.
Amos Guiora, a professor at the University of Utah and an expert on national security and international law, said the case was unusual but not especially surprising.
“In the context of international law or sovereignty, yes, this is pretty offensive,” he said. He noted the old news that dozens of well-connected Saudis had fled the US on chartered flights in the days after 9/11.
A statement from the Saudi Government distributed by an embassy spokesman said it was Saudi policy to post bail for citizens who were incarcerated in the US when they sought that help.
The embassy declined to answer questions about whether government officials were involved with Noorah’s escape, saying only that “no travel document was issued by the Embassy or Consulate for Mr Noorah”.
The FBI declined to comment on the case. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment. Overstreet is not hopeful about his chances of seeing Noorah in a US courtroom any time soon. The US does not have an extradition treaty with Saudi Arabia.
“Nothing is going to happen to him. He can just go live his life, and what that does to the family [of Fallon Smart],” he said. “I think they’re revictimised on a daily basis.”