Saudis detain US mother trapped in custody battle

SAUDI ARABIA has detained an American woman duped into returning to the kingdom in a custody battle over her daughter with her Saudi ex-husband.

Carly Morris was summoned to a police station in Buraidah on Monday and has not been released, according to Freedom Initiative, a group that advocates for people it believes are wrongfully detained in the Middle East.

“It is unclear if her daughter was detained with her or turned over to her ex-husband,” it said in a statement.

Ms Morris and her daughter Tala, eight, have been trapped in Saudi Arabia since 2019, when her ex-husband persuaded them to visit so his parents could meet their granddaughter.

He then seized their documents and arranged for his daughter to take Saudi citizenship. The country’s guardianship laws permit him to prevent her leaving.

Ms Morris remained in the kingdom, making increasingly desperate pleas for help from Saudi and US officials.

In September, she was summoned by a public prosecutor on charges of “disrupting public order”, often used against critics of the Saudi regime.

Her Twitter account has been deleted since her detention on Monday.

Ned Price, a US state department spokesman, said their embassy in Riyadh was following the situation closely.

The detention comes at a low point for Saudi-us relations, after Washington accused Riyadh of orchestrating Opec oil cuts and siding with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.

The Saudi government has not commented on the matter and the family of Ms Morris’s ex-husband did not respond to requests for comment.