Kuwaiti Man Gets 10 Years For Insulting Islam on Twitter

26-year-old Hamad al-Naqi, the Kuwaiti man who has been sitting in jail for the past three months (since his arrest) for insulting Mohammed, Aisha (his 9-year-old wife) and Mohammed's companions via Twitter, will spend the next ten years in jail for those transgressions. Other charges included "spreading false news that undermined Kuwait's image abroad" (as though that takes much), and for insulting Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

According to the court, al-Naqi had "endangered state security" with those insults, although I'm not quite sure how.

Khaled al-Shatti, his lawyer, seems overly positive. He told AFP:

“We plan to challenge the ruling against my client Hamad al-Naqi in the appeals court and we are very optimistic that the higher court will cancel the sentence."

Al-Naqi claims his account was hacked, which is a definite possibility, but the court didn't buy that excuse.

He could have been sentenced to death, since Kuwait recently passed a law approving the death sentence for 'cursing God'- and naturally there were those demanding it- but he lucked out that the bill has not yet been implemented. He did, however, receive the maximum sentence for his criminal tweets.

Our jails would be overflowing if we had the same laws as Kuwait.