Two sisters from Saudi Arabia were intercepted at Hong Kong International Airport by the kingdom’s diplomats en route to Australia, their lawyer said on Thursday, this year’s second high-profile case of Saudi Arabian women trying to flee what they have called repression at home.
Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman is visiting Beijing on a tour of Asia just one month after a Saudi Arabian woman made global headlines by barricading herself in a hotel at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport to avoid being sent home to her family.
“These brave, young, intelligent women have been living in fear, in hiding and in legal limbo in Hong Kong, not knowing what their future holds,” their lawyer, Michael Vidler, said in a statement.
They hoped to find a third-country “place of safety” as soon as possible, he added.
The pair, who have renounced their Muslim faith, arrived in the Chinese territory in September last year after fleeing a family vacation in Sri Lanka and had booked a connecting flight to Australia, Vidler said.
However, the sisters, aged 18 and 20, whose identity Vidler did not reveal, were intercepted by officials during their stopover in the Asian financial hub, before they managed to escape and enter the territory as visitors, he said.
The women, who have been in hiding in the former British colony for the past five months, told the lawyer their connecting flight to Australia was canceled and that the officials tried to put them on a flight to the Saudi Arabian capital, Riyadh.
The sisters learned that the officials who intercepted them were Saudi Arabia’s consul general and vice consul general in Hong Kong, but did not explain how they came by the information, the lawyer said.
The Saudi Arabian consulate in Hong Kong did not respond to a request from reporters for comment yesterday.
“We fled our home to ensure our safety,” the women said in the statement. “We hope that we can be given asylum in a country which recognizes women’s rights and treats them as equals. We dream of being in a safe place where we can be normal young women, free from violence and oppression.”
Since September, the sisters have changed location 13 times, fearing for their safety, Vidler said.
In November last year, the Hong Kong Immigration Department told them that their Saudi Arabian passports had been invalidated and that they could only stay in the territory until Thursday next week.
Hong Kong police said only that they had received a report from “two expatriate women” and were investigating, but did not elaborate.
The department said that it would not comment on individual cases.
The incident — and last month’s case of the barricaded 18-year-old, who has since been granted asylum in Canada — spotlights Saudi Arabia’s strict social rules that require women to secure travel permission from a male “guardian,” which rights groups have said can leave them trapped as prisoners of abusive families.
Riyadh is facing unusually intense scrutiny from its Western allies over the killing of a journalist at its consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, in October and over the humanitarian consequences of its war in Yemen.
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