The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Activist group calls for UNH to reassess ties with Saudi Arabia
In the wake of Khashoggi death
WEST HAVEN — An activist group has called on University of New Haven to reassess its relationship with Saudi Arabia after Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who lived in the U.S., was allegedly tortured and killed in the Saudi consulate in Turkey.
In a written statement, Stanley Heller of the Middle East Crisis Committee also called on the directors of the Abdallah S. Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law at Yale Law School to speak out in the wake of the latest news.
“The Middle East Crisis Committee believes Connecticut institutions with relationships with Saudi Arabia must take action to protest the Khashoggi murder,” Heller wrote this week.
“In view of the Khashoggi murder we call on the University of New Haven, which has a security studies program at the police college of Saudi Arabia and is apparently teaching forensic skills there, to immediately suspend all cooperation with that college and to publicly explain what it is doing in Saudi Arabia,” Heller wrote.
The college is the King Fahd Security College in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, he said.
Heller initially said that Salah Muhammed al-Tubaigy, head of forensics at the Saudi General Security Department — who some media have reported murdered Khashoggi and cut off parts of his body — is on the board of directors of King Fahd Security College.
But University of New Haven spokeswoman Lyn Chamberlin said that’s not the case — and in fact, King Fahd Security College doesn’t have a board of directors.
A Google translation of a page on the King Fahd Security College website lists a board of directors that includes someone by a similar name as a member. But that board appears to be for the Saudi Society for Forensic Medicine, according to a heading on that page.
The web page’s address url refers to the board as a “governing council.”
UNH has been told that the Dr. Salah Mohammed Al-Tabaiqi listed on the website is not the same person as the Dr. Salah Muhammed al-Tubaigy who has been in the news, Chamberlin said.
It is was not immediately clear what direct connection, if any, there might be between the Saudi Society for Forensic Medicine and King Fahd Security College.
Heller later said by phone that at University of New Haven, “They are training Saudi police ... in forensic techniques and helping them spy on their people ... They may have had polite meetings with the board, and this person ... sitting at the meetings.”
But Chamberlin, the university’s vice president of marketing and communications, said that’s not true and that “the director of the college has said it’s not true.
“We’ve never had any interactions with this guy...” Chamberlin said. What’s more, “we’ve never taught forensic sciences to a single cohort there ... We’re advising the King Fahd College on the degree program there.”
Heller “has never taken the time to talk to anyone here ... about forensic science or the program,” she said.
Heller pointed out in the release that the Middle East Crisis Committee has “called in the past for UNH President Steven H. Kaplan and Mario Gaboury, dean of UNH’s Henry C. Lee College of Criminal Justice and Forensic Sciences to explain what they are teaching at the King Fahd Security College in Riyadh, to no avail.
“We have asked how they can justify doing work with a police college in a country with an absolute monarchy and a justice system known for prosecuting activists calling for democratic rights and full equality for women, one where suspects are tortured,” he wrote. “We’ve been met only with silence...
“This murder of Khashoggi is an outrageous violation of any legal precept and demands condemnation,” Heller wrote.
“It would be extremely beneficial if the Kamel Center hosted an emergency public conference of Islamic law scholars to examine the woeful state of the Saudi system of justice in a country that claims to strictly follow Islamic law,” he said.