A former senior official at Jeddah Mayoralty who is involved in the Jeddah flood case appeared before the District Court with his lawyer on Wednesday. During the 70-minute session, the accused claimed all charges leveled at him were untrue. He also retracted his previous statements and claimed that he was under a lot of stress and wanted to withdraw the confession based on Article (102) of the Legal Proceedings Law. This article stipulates that “the accused should not be under stress when making any statements during investigation and should not be coerced.” The accused and his lawyer insisted that the District Court does not have jurisdiction to look into the case. They claimed that the case should be decided upon by the Bureau of Grievances. The official is a senior engineer who worked on the committees of rains, floods and roads at Jeddah Mayoralty for 20 years. He is accused of being responsible for killing innocent people and damaging private and public property during the Jeddah floods. The Prosecutor General submitted evidence which incriminates the senior official and accused him of taking bribes, squandering public money and not performing his duties as he should have. Meanwhile, a new case of a businessman accused of killing innocent people and damaging public property during the Jeddah flood catastrophe has been submitted to the Jeddah District Court by the Bureau of Investigation and Prosecution. “The 53-year-old Saudi businessman's annual income is about SR4 million, he also owns a building at Al-Salamah District, a mall, a 1,200 square meter plot of land at Al-Khalidiya District plus eight parcels of land and he has SR1 million in an account in a foreign bank.” The man claims he and another businessman went to a former Jeddah mayor and asked for a license to build an extra floor on a residential project. The mayor agreed to do so for SR2 million. The mayor also allegedly took SR5 million while he himself took SR500,000 from the businessman who accompanied him. __
