Saad Almadi release — WASHINGTON — Saudi Arabia has lifted a yearslong exit ban on 75-year-old U.S.-Saudi citizen Saad Ibrahim Almadi, finally allowing the Florida retiree jailed over critical tweets to leave the kingdom as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visits the White House. The decision, announced by his family and acknowledged by U.S. officials, ends a four-year ordeal that included prison time and a cybercrimes conviction, Nov. 20, 2025.
His son, Ibrahim Almadi, said Saudi authorities informed the family this week that the exit ban had been lifted and that the 75-year-old was on his way back to the United States, a development regional outlet Al-Monitor reported as Mohammed bin Salman received a lavish welcome in Washington.
In a statement circulated by his son, the family thanked Trump personally, saying, “This day would not have been possible without President Donald Trump and the tireless efforts of his administration,” while urging continued attention to other detainees.
That praise marks a sharp turn from earlier years, when Ibrahim Almadi publicly accused U.S. officials of doing too little as Saudi courts imposed a 16-year sentence and matching travel ban over his father’s tweets, according to 2022 coverage by Reuters and other outlets.
Almadi, a retired project manager who had been living in Florida for decades, was arrested in November 2021 after flying to Riyadh to visit relatives. Saudi prosecutors later charged him over 14 tweets that mentioned alleged corruption, high-level policies and the 2018 murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
Georgetown University’s Free Speech Project recorded how Saudi courts initially handed Almadi a 16-year prison term and long travel ban under the kingdom’s cybercrime laws. Reuters and other outlets later reported that an appeals court increased the sentence to 19 years before international pressure helped secure his release from prison in 2023.
When Saudi authorities freed Almadi from prison in March 2023, his son welcomed the dropped terrorism charges but noted that a court-imposed travel ban still barred him from leaving Saudi Arabia, a limbo described in coverage carried by NDTV based on international wire reports.
Last month, an Associated Press story detailed how a Saudi court reclassified his tweets as “cyber crimes,” upheld his conviction and barred him from leaving the kingdom until March 2026, even as the Trump administration deepened security and investment ties with Riyadh.
Rights advocates say the Saad Almadi release underscores how closely the kingdom links freedom of expression to its diplomatic calculations. They point to similarly harsh sentences for other Twitter users, including Saudi doctoral student Salma al-Shehab, whose prison term was only reduced this year after intense international pressure, according to an earlier AP report.
The Saad Almadi release also lands in the middle of Mohammed bin Salman’s first trip to Washington since the Khashoggi killing, a visit framed around multi-billion-dollar arms, nuclear and investment deals, according to detailed previews by outlets such as Al Jazeera and Time magazine.
Critics argue that securing one high-profile release while expanding defense and business ties risks normalizing Saudi crackdowns on dissidents. Human rights groups have long warned that Washington’s willingness to deepen security cooperation, even after Khashoggi’s murder, weakens its leverage to demand structural reforms to laws used to criminalize peaceful speech.
For Almadi and his relatives, the Saad Almadi release closes only part of the story. In a statement quoted by the Guardian, they said, “Our family is overjoyed that, after four long years, our father, Saad Almadi, is finally on his way home to the United States!” and expressed hope that the support and care they received would extend to others still detained or facing exit bans in Saudi Arabia and beyond.
