William Sampson dies fighting
Canadian never fully recovered from unjust ordeal in Saudi prison
William Sampson died alone.
Nine years after he was released from a Saudi prison where he had been brutally tortured, he died of an apparent heart attack in a two-bedroom flat in the Penrith Lake District of England. He was 52.
There was no one to report his death. His father, James Sampson, died last year, one day before turning 80. William had been estranged from his mother, Barbara Sampson, 79, since he was 18.
William lost touch with many friends and family after his release from Riyadh in August 2003. He never recovered from the torture or long solitary confinement, sentenced to death for a murder he didn’t commit.
He spent two years, seven months, three weeks and two days in prison. He was beaten and raped.
He never got justice. He was pardoned but not cleared of the charges relating to the death of a British engineer in a car bombing in Riyadh in November 2000.
He tried to sue his torturers and lost. He appealed the case, which remains before the European Court of Human Rights.
William suffered his fourth heart attack six months ago. He had kidney problems. His feet, beaten with rods in prison, were so damaged he found it difficult to walk.
“He said that he didn’t think he would live to see the end of the case,” said his friend Les Walker, a Briton who was arrested after William and released on the same day in August. “I said to him that I would keep fighting.”
His passion was seeking justice in the European courts. Most of his time was spent researching similar cases on the web. He was sitting at his computer when he died.
His mother, who lives in Vancouver where William grew up, is awaiting autopsy results, but William suffered from heart disease since his 40s. He had a heart attack during his confinement in Saudi Arabia and underwent angioplasty.
William was happy in Penrith, said Walker. He loved the rural setting and the slow pace of life. He had two close friends and was on a trivia team at a local pub. He knew love, but never married.
“He was one of the finest friends I ever had,” said Walker. “He was brutally honest. People didn’t like him because he was so blunt, but when you got to know Bill, he was a gem of a person.”
William was brilliant and difficult. He had earned a PHD in biochemistry and an MBA. When angered, he was wild and could be vicious. He burned bridges — a lot. But he was heroic. He could not turn his back on anyone who needed help. “The Saudis shortened Bill’s life in their torture chambers in Riyadh, followed by the barbaric detention he endured for a crime he did not commit,” said Sandy Mitchell, one of the seven arrested and tortured for the same crime. Mitchell could hear William’s screams as he was being tortured. “The Canadian and British government accelerated his death by denying him justice when they granted sovereign immunity to the Saudi officials who raped and tortured him,” Mitchell wrote in an email. He was happiest travelling on his own. His wanderlust took him around the globe and finally to Saudi Arabia, which he was anxious to explore like Wilfred Thesiger in Arabian Sands and Lawrence of Arabia. He was deeply curious and found joy in learning. In Riyadh, where he worked in pharmaceutical marketing, he fell in with a group of expats, including Mitchell and Walker, who frequent- ed the illegal bars in the Muslim capital. For a long time, illegal drinking by Westerners was tolerated. Then it was not. William and his friends were caught up in the crackdown. There was never any evidence to connect them to the bombing. There was no credible investigation conducted into the crime. They were rounded up, their confessions extracted by torture and broadcast on television worldwide. Canadian officials visited William several times in Riyadh. He regarded them with intense disdain. He thought they were clueless and ineffective. Documents obtained during and after his incarceration confirmed that Canadian authorities did know he was being tortured. An official close to the case said foreign affairs did not publicly admit William was being tortured so as to protect him from greater abuse and possibly death. Raf Schyvens, William’s Belgian friend — who under torture falsely accused him of the bombing — now works as a remote medic in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He blames himself for what happened to William, but William never did.
William lived on welfare after his release, according to David Paperny, the Vancouver filmmaker who turned William’s book, Confessions of an Innocent Man, into a documentary film of the same name.
Despite all that happened to him, William had an inner buoyancy and an ability to see himself for who he was. “I had lived what I considered to be a full life and I’ve always known that I won’t get out of life alive,” he said in a series of interviews after his release in 2003.
“My incarceration and near-death have made me view the rest of my life as something extra, as something not to be wasted. I look at the desperate manner in which people try to climb on top of each other and realize what a waste it is.
“I already have the three single most important things in the world: freedom, family and loyal friends. The rest is ephemeral.”