Leading Arab daily still banned in Saudi

Neither Al-Hayat nor the government have commented on when the paper will go back on sale.

Saudi Arabia’s ban on the distribution of influential Arab daily Al-Hayat is still in force today, a leading bookstore in the kingdom said today.

“No edition of Al-Hayat is available for sale today,” the management of Al-Jarir Bookstore in Riyadh told ArabianBusiness.com.

“We haven’t been given a reason as to why it has been banned or for how long.”

ArabianBusiness.com exclusively broke the story of the government's ban of the London-based newspaper’s Saudi edition, which did not appear on newsstands in the kingdom on Monday or Tuesday.

A member of Al-Hayat's management in Riyadh told ArabianBusiness.com on Tuesday that the paper's distribution had been stopped, but said it was just for one day on Monday.

Management claimed the ban was not related any specific article, but that the paper had not been informed of the reason by Saudi censors.

Al-Hayat and Saudi Ministry of Information and Culture were not immediately available for comment, although both have confirmed to news agencies that the paper is not longer on sale in the Kingdom.

Speculation

The ban has been widely reported in media across the globe and several conflicting reasons have been given for why the government stopped Al-Hayat's distribution.

A Saudi journalist with knowledge of the situation said he believed that the ministry had imposed the ban after the paper published an article on Monday about a Saudi man fighting for Iraqi militant group the Islamic State of Iraq, reported newswire AP.

The journalist also said that the ban was indefinite. Neither Al-Hayat nor the government have commented on when the paper will go back on sale.

Dawood Al-Shirian, a former regional director and weekly columnist for Al-Hayat, said that Al-Hayat staff had informed him that Saudi Information Minister Iyad Madani had asked that some writers be stopped from appearing in the paper after criticising ministries, but that the paper had refused to comply, AP reported.

An Al-Hayat source who wished to remain anonymous also told Reuters that the paper was banned due to criticism of government ministries, citing columns by journalist Abdelaziz Al Suwaid.

Al-Suwaidi’s columns in the paper have recently dealt with problems in the kingdom’s health system and the deaths of 2,000 camels in Saudi Arabia earlier this month, which is still under investigation. The Ministry of Agriculture has blamed the deaths on foodstuffs and denied the presence of an infectious disease.

“The paper should protect its writers,” said the journalist told Reuters on Tuesday, requesting anonymity. “I don’t think he went beyond red lines.”

Al-Hayat has several different editions. Its Saudi edition is believed to have the second-largest circulation of any newspaper in the kingdom.

Saudi papers are government-guided, with red lines usually drawn around sensitive topics and tightly censored by the kingdom’s authorities.

Al-Hayat has been banned in the kingdom on numerous occasions before. In October 2002, Saudi censors banned a single edition of the paper for printing an open letter from 67 American intellectuals defending the US campaign against terrorism and calling on Saudi intellectuals to denounce extremism.

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