There is a state, which beheads and even crucifies its citizens.
Where those who question its authority are lashed...
..and locked up for years.
A state where women lack many basic rights.
Patrolled by religious police...
Where children are indoctrinated.
(DISGUISED VOICE)
But this is not the Islamic State.
This is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
A close ally which buys billions of pounds worth of British arms...
..whose security forces we equip and train...
..even though they're in conflict with many of their own people.
Whose oil we buy
and whose royals get the red-carpet treatment.
We have a relationship with Saudi Arabia
because we receive from them
important intelligence and security information that keep us safe.
Working with a team of Saudi undercover cameramen,
this film sets out to penetrate
one of the world's most secretive and repressive states.
The women, they are imprisoned.
They just fear freedom.
Because of American and European support to the Saudi monarchy,
our people have suffered.
And we will uncover how Saudi money and ideology
have helped drive terrorism around the world.
(AUTOMATIC GUNFIRE)
There's a very real threat that the ideology that comes from there is posing to us.
Morally, we need to make a stand. I think the chickens are coming home to roost on this one.
In January 2015,
the Union Jack was flown at half-mast in Westminster...
..a very special mark of respect for a close ally.
The Saudi ruler King Abdullah had died.
Many world leaders came to the capital city Riyadh to pay tribute.
(PRAYING IN ARABIC)
In the same month, in another Saudi city...
(TANNOY ANNOUNCEMENT)
..a young blogger was whipped in public.
Raif Badawi was convicted of insulting Islam,
after he spoke out about his government and religion.
He wrote, 'The only way to deal with an unfree world
is to become so absolutely free
that your very existence is an act of rebellion.'
For comments like this, Badawi, a father of three young children,
was sentenced to ten years in prison
and 1,000 lashes.
We don't approve of what Saudi Arabia does.
We don't like what they do.
But they are a necessary evil in combatting other regimes.
And of course, ultimately, they have a lot of oil.
No country is the perfect ally,
the perfect partner, without any reservations whatsoever.
So, you know, welcome to the real world.
Welcome to the premier league.
(SEAGULLS CALL)
(DISGUISED VOICE)
Yasser is part of an underground network of activists in Saudi Arabia.
It's one of the most secretive countries in the world.
No journalist can operate freely,
and you can't even get in as a tourist.
So Yasser's come to Istanbul at great risk
to collect an undercover camera.
Over the next six months, he will be filming secretly inside Saudi Arabia.
If caught, he'll be imprisoned.
Two days later,
Yasser is flying back into Riyadh to begin filming undercover.
In Saudi Arabia, the king is all-powerful.
Since he came to the throne in 2015,
King Salman's face looms large over the streets.
Saudi Arabia is the home of Islam's holiest sites
and the world's largest oil exporter.
Its state oil company is worth an estimated £7 trillion.
The royal family and their inner circle are worth billions.
Yasser films an avenue of palaces.
The external face of Saudi Arabia
is ostentatious wealth and luxury shopping malls.
But the global crash in oil prices has hit the Saudi economy hard.
Despite spending billions on social welfare,
it's been estimated up to a quarter of the population live in poverty.
This is how millions of Saudis live -
a reality rarely seen by the world because you can't film openly here.
Yasser's in Saudi's second city - Jeddah.
He shows us how women often end up begging on the streets.
It's estimated only one in five Saudi women of working age have jobs...
..and without a man's support, many end up on the street.
(MUEZZIN CALLS IN BACKGROUND)
Yasser and his friend head down to the beach to play their lute.
But before they even get there,
they run into the religious police on patrol.
In Saudi Arabia, playing music in public
is forbidden by the religious police.
(LUTE MUSIC)
After Yasser and his friends have been there for less than five minutes,
the police return.
This was the last shot recorded
before Yasser's lute and hidden camera were smashed.
For Yasser and his friends,
the religious police are a constant menace.
Their official title is the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.
They patrol the streets and shopping malls, enforcing strict Islamic laws.
Activists like Yasser have been filming and sharing clips
to expose what they say is their constant harassment.
They force women to cover themselves
and drive people out of cafes to go and pray.
Their strict form of Sunni Islam is known as Wahhabism.
It is the religion on which Saudi Arabia was founded.
(SCREAMS)
Here the religious police are smashing bottles,
thought to be alcohol.
The majority of Saudis are thought to support the state Wahhabi ideology.
(AMPLIFIED PREACHING)
Filming secretly in a mosque,
Yasser records this preacher spreading hatred of other religions.
The state Wahhabi ideology is taught to Saudi children from an early age.
Yasser films a 14-year-old Saudi boy
showing him the books they use at his school -
books made in Saudi Arabia,
but exported to the world.
The textbook doesn't just attack other religions.
It portrays the Shia Muslim minority at home as the enemy.
The Saudi education system
has been intended as an insurance policy,
as a security measure,
to protect the ruling family,
and to mislead the millions of students
into hatred of other religions, other cultures
and into the worship of the Saudi ruling family.
Saudi Arabia is said to have made some progress
reforming its textbooks, removing the worst examples of prejudice.
But these books are still found
in mosques and schools around the world -
everywhere from Britain to areas of Syria controlled by ISIS.
No wonder thousands of Saudis
joined ISIS and and other terror groups
because they were trained in Saudi schools.
From the foundation of Saudi Arabia,
the support of the religious establishment has been central
to the royal family's grip on power.
The regime uses traditional Islamic punishments.
Executions are often carried out publicly
with one sword blow to the neck.
The headless bodies are sometimes then displayed publicly.
According to human rights groups, King Salman has asserted his rule
by stepping up the rate of executions
to its highest level for 20 years.
In 2015, Saudi Arabia executed 157 people.
This Burmese woman was convicted of killing her stepdaughter.
(WOMAN SCREAMING)
This was filmed by a policeman.
He was later arrested after posting it online.
The Saudi government claims only the most serious criminals are executed,
and punishments are carried out in line with Sharia Law.
They say trials are fair, though human rights groups disagree.
(DISGUISED VOICE)
In Saudi Arabia, criticising the government,
criticising religious people are considered as acts of terror.
People are reporting on each other, targeting their fellow citizens,
so everyone becomes, you know, more religious than ever,
everybody becomes more pro-government than ever.
So we are going into a fascist society.
The Saudi government says the anti-terror laws
strikes a balance between prevention of crimes
and protection of human rights, according to Islamic law.
One activist story more than any other
encapsulates Saudi suppression of free speech.
This is Raif Badawi, speaking before his eventual arrest in 2012.
For most of his sentence, Raif has been held
in one of Saudi Arabia's most notorious prisons - Briman.
Saudi Arabia shows outsiders state-of-the-art prisons,
but people rarely see the reality.
Since Raif was imprisoned,
Yasser's network has managed to smuggle camera phones into Briman.
What they found was chaos and lawlessness
and prisoners injecting themselves.
Here a prisoner is abused by his fellow inmates.
The British government had approved a £6 million contract
to train Saudis on how to run its prisons.
Amid the international outcry about cases like Raif Badawi's,
it decided to cancel the deal,
saying it was focusing its resources on domestic priorities.
Raif Badawi has received no more lashes since the first 50,
but his sentence of ten years still stands.
(APPLAUSE)
Thousands of miles away, his wife Ensaf and three children
have received asylum after escaping Saudi Arabia.
They haven't seen their father for four years.
MAN: When does he think he will see his dad again?
Ten-year-old Dudi and his sisters
only get very rare phone calls with their father from prison.
Their mother Ensaf works tirelessly to keep up the family's morale
and to raise pressure for his release.
Ensaf's campaigning and international pressure
mean that Raif's case is up for review in a Saudi court.
In part two, we go into Saudi Arabia undercover ourselves
and come face-to-face with the Saudi state.
Our undercover cameraman, Yasser, has been filming for us at great risk.
He and his network are trying to reveal the other side of our close ally.
(SCREAMING)
Saudi Arabia doesn't allow tourists
and they don't allow journalists to operate without minders.
So we're flying into Riyadh as businessmen
after setting up a fake company.
We're taking secret cameras to record our trip.
When we get to passport control, there's a bad moment.
The border guard looks directly at our hidden camera.
What's this?
Now we're in Saudi Arabia, all filming we do is forbidden.
Our cover story is that we're here for a business conference.
On the way, we visit one of Saudi Arabia's most notorious landmarks,
known as Chop-Chop Square.
It's the scene of many of Saudi Arabia's public punishments
and there's a heavy police presence.
It has drainage for the blood from the executions.
Two Westerners in the middle of Chop-Chop Square
inevitably raise suspicion.
We're going to a cyber security conference
representing Cyber Safe UK, a company we've set up for this trip.
We've been placed right next to the Ministry of Interior,
the very people who arrest activists like Raif Badawi.
And we're approached by two senior police officers.
This man is head of cyber security for the Saudi police.
He's keen to talk about his connections to Britain and America.
British police officers? Oh, my...
The British government has been reluctant to make public
details about its contract to train the Saudi police.
But now we are hearing about it from two officers
who have been through the training.
Yeah, there's a close relationship.
The British government has since confirmed to us
they have provided more than 300 Saudi officers with training
since December 2012.
Despite some reforms in education, employment and politics in recent years,
women still don't have the same legal rights as adult men.
Women can't drive and struggle to perform many simple tasks
such as going to the doctor's without a male guardian.
In some cases of abuse, the authorities do act,
but if a woman is the victim and tries to report it,
the police may tell her she needs a male relative
to file a complaint.
It's a tribal society and it's being kept this way.
Violence is a symptom of the position of women in a society
because it reflects how people view the roles of women.
The philosophy of the government is to keep the control of the man
or the power of the father, basically.
Violence is used as a disciplinary way,
or a controlling way.
But some women in Saudi Arabia are starting to fight back.
One woman has become the figurehead for the new women's rights movement.
It's to meet her that we've come to Saudi.
Loujain Hathloul is Saudi Arabia's most prominent women's activist,
a constant thorn in the side of the regime.
She uploaded videos of herself driving
as part of a campaign to change the ban against it.
Moments after this was filmed,
Loujain was arrested trying to enter Saudi Arabia.
She was imprisoned for 73 days without trial.
Eventually she was released, but she is banned from travelling
and she says she still has terrorism charges against her.
Despite the risk, she is still happy to meet us.
She may be under surveillance, so we have to meet her in a secret location.
I've been threatened since the beginning.
My car was broken, I almost got beaten up just because of the campaign.
People wrote me letters on Facebook
and er...send me all sorts of weapon pictures
saying that if I continue I would be murdered or my family harmed.
Loujain's campaign sparked a debate inside Saudi Arabia.
To some women, she became a hero.
To the more conservative elements, a hate figure.
I try to represent their rights.
Some of them don't believe that it's their own rights.
They refuse it, they reject it.
But I believe that they're imprisoned in their own old ways
and their old mindset, or they just fear freedom.
Although banned from activism, Loujain hasn't stopped campaigning.
She's registering as a candidate in the 2015 municipal elections,
the first in which Saudi women can participate.
It's scary. I'm not saying it's not scary, but I'm continuing.
I am not stopping. I am stepping - shaking while stepping, yes -
but I'm not giving up.
We've managed to meet a Saudi activist
without being detected by the security forces.
But when we get back to the hotel, there's a shock.
The fake company website we've set up has been hacked.
We don't know who's testing our cover story,
but we're forced to leave early and head straight to the airport.
Hopefully there's no ban... no travel ban on our passports.
If we're discovered, we know we'll be arrested.
We'd got out, but Yasser is still filming inside.
One of his network is driving to a region that's witnessed serious unrest
and the first signs of potential cracks in Saudi rule.
The east of Saudi Arabia
is where most of the Shia Muslim minority live.
He's come to meet the family of a boy
who has been condemned to death, aged just 17.
Ali Nimr's punishment marked the beginning of what activists say
is a dangerous new phase for the Saudi regime.
(CHILD SQUEALING)
In 2011, Ali Nimr was a schoolboy
who joined in street protests inspired by the Arab Spring.
(CHANTING)
Young Shia men hit the streets in unprecedented numbers
in a country where protests are illegal.
As the days passed,
the confrontations with the security forces became more intense.
The Saudi police reacted to the protesters with bullets.
Scenes like this have raised questions
about Britain's contract to train Saudi police.
(GUNFIRE)
Protests sprung up in other parts of the country
and activists like our cameraman Yasser
sensed weakness in the regime for the first time.
Eventually, after tens of protesters were killed and many more arrested,
the regime succeeded in putting down the uprising.
Ali recorded his anger at the police's reaction
in this confrontation outside a police station.
Soon after this was recorded, Ali was arrested.
He was charged with numerous offences including throwing a Molotov cocktail
and organising protests by text message.
His family say he was tortured into confessing.
The punishment for treason is beheading,
followed by being publicly crucified.
But some felt Ali was being punished because of this man.
Sheikh Nimr was Ali's uncle.
He was seen as the spiritual leader of the protests.
The British government says it has lobbied to spare Ali the death penalty.
But in September 2015, Ali's death sentence was confirmed
with no more chance to appeal.
In the same week,
it was revealed that Saudi Arabia was made the chair of the UN Human Rights Council panel of experts.
Ensaf, the wife of Raif Badawi, the blogger sentenced to 1,000 lashes
is in Strasbourg to collect an award on his behalf.
It's good for her campaign,
but the review of Raif's case in the Saudi courts has not gone well.
In response to his appeal being denied,
she says Raif has begun a hunger strike.
In part three, we uncover how internal Saudi ideology
has been spread around the world.
For more than 70 years,
Saudi Arabia has been Britain and the West's key ally in the Arab world.
The government says they've kept us safe
by sharing intelligence and helping us fight terrorism
and foil attacks.
Very, very nice to see you.
Since David Cameron's government came to power,
we've sold Saudi Arabia more than £5b of weapons.
Saudi Arabia has been a very important partner.
We've got our oil from them, we've sold weapons technology to them
and they have been an ally in providing intelligence
about low-level Al Qaeda activities.
But there's an irony there and that is because actually Al Qaeda
stems from an extreme interpretation of Wahhabi Salafism,
which is the official religion of Saudi Arabia,
which has been spreading around the world since 1979.
Erm...so there's an ambivalence to that relationship.
The Saudis have spent at least $70 billion
spreading Wahhabi Islam around the world.
But they've always denied any official link to terrorism...
..and are now preparing to send troops in
to fight against ISIS in Syria.
But evidence has come to light,
related to the most high-profile terror attack of all.
Holy shit!
15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi citizens.
Osama Bin Laden himself came from a prominent Saudi family.
It prompted the United States
to investigate Saudi links to terrorist organisations.
There were individuals within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,
some of them prominent citizens,
some of them people with ties to the royal family,
who were funnelling funds to all kinds of activities.
We saw tremendous amounts of money were going
to promote a Wahhabi variation of Sunni Islam.
And that led to, I think, mostly unintended consequences,
but theyshould have been recognisable consequences.
According to US Government documents we've obtained,
a pattern emerged of Islamic charities supporting terrorism.
The CIA reported that governments
in the Islamic world had supported the charities' religious activities,
but were unable to monitor them or how their money was used.
The name of one charity came up repeatedly -
the Saudi High Commission for Bosnia and Herzegovina.
It was set up in Sarajevo by Saudi Arabia
and provided more than £300 million in aid for Bosnian Muslims.
The Saudi High Commission was a significant state-funded charity,
and it was tied in certain instances to financing terrorism,
in particular in Bosnia, for example.
There were people within this institution
who were funnelling funds to terrorist groups at the time.
But more than allegations of passing on money,
we've found evidence the Saudi High Commission was providing employment
and cover for terrorists.
Inside this New York courthouse are boxes of evidence
for a case brought by the families of 9/11 victims
against the Saudi government and the Saudi High Commission.
The families are currently appealing their case
after it was dismissed last year on the grounds of sovereign immunity.
Among the material is this tape,
recorded testimony from a convicted Al Qaeda terrorist.
It's never before been broadcast.
(SPEAKS NATIVE TONGUE)
This is Ali Hamad, a jihadi
who fought with the mujahideen in Afghanistan and Bosnia.
He alleges he and others were employed
by the Saudi High Commission
and that local officials at the charity knew
that he was linked to Al Qaeda.
He says Bosnia was seen as a crucial foothold in Europe
for Al Qaeda to plan future attacks.
Hamad was later involved in setting off a car bomb in Bosnia in 1997
after the war had ended.
It was apparently designed to kill non-Muslims
and reignite the fighting there.
Documents obtained by lawyers for the 9/11 families
also reveal Washington knew about the charity's direct links to terror.
But it was only after 9/11 that action was taken.
NATO's heightened state of security...
Two weeks after the 9/11 attacks,
NATO special forces raided the charity's offices in Sarajevo.
Are you saying that you have evidence
of Al Qaeda's activities here in Bosnia?Yes.
We've spoken to another senior officer involved in the raid,
who described the material they uncovered as 'very disturbing'.
A hard drive of maps of military buildings in Washington,
information on how to fake State Department badges
and before-and-after pictures of the World Trade Center.
The scope of the evidence,
the number of people with terrorist connections
who were affiliated with this organisation,
the amount of money that flowed out of it, undermines the notion
that it was a purely legitimate humanitarian organisation.
There was certainly something else going on.
Documents filed in court confirm
that the Saudi High Commission was an official arm of its government,
which provided a third of its funding.
And that the charity's president throughout this period was the man
whose face now hangs over the streets of Riyadh -
at the time Prince, now King Salman.
And Saudi media reported he visited its offices in Sarajevo
a year before it was raided.
The Saudi High Commission was linkedto radical individuals
who, in several different instances,
were allegedly involved with Al Qaeda.
That suggests to me a questionable sense of judgement
about what thedrivers of terrorism historically have been.
King Salman could or should have done a better job
in exerting oversightover the organisations in which he was chair.
The Saudi government in the past has said
that none of its agencies knowingly provided funds to Al Qaeda
or other terrorist groups.
There is no suggestion King Salman, the royal family
or senior Saudi officials knew about, or were involved in,
the alleged support for terrorism at the Saudi High Commission.
The 9/11 Commission said
that although Saudi Arabia had long been considered
the primary source of Al Qaeda funding,
it had found no evidence that the Saudi government
or senior officials individually funded Al Qaeda,
but that this did not exclude the likelihood
that charities with significant Saudi government sponsorship
diverted funds to Al Qaeda.
Since 9/11, Saudi Arabia has wanted to show the world
that they are tackling terrorism.
They themselves have been the target of attacks and they have passed laws
to clamp down on private donations from inside the Kingdom.
They have carried out airstrikes against ISIS
and are now preparing for a ground war against them in Syria.
They also deny Saudi Arabia supports ISIS ideologically.
But many feel that it is the underlying Wahhabi
ideology that's the wider problem.
The ideology of ISIS is not much different from the ideology
that Wahhabi Salafi Islam in Saudi Arabia adheres to.
Unless the Saudis deal with this issue,
we are going to constantly fight yesterday's war,
and even if we defeat ISIS,
there'll be another terrorist organisation,
perhaps with a different name,
as long as they have this ideology that emanates from Saudi Arabia.
I think our national interest
needs to take into account the very real threat
that the ideology that comes from there is posing to us.
We see this in ISIS, we see it in our domestic terrorism.
And so I think that, morally, we need to make a stand.
I think the chickens are coming home to roost on this one.
King Salman's government says it is leading
a crackdown on terrorism at home as well as abroad.
They have led a coalition against an uprising
by a Shia militia in neighbouring Yemen,
using British and American weaponry in a widespread bombing campaign.
(EXPLOSION)
And on the 2nd January, 2016, they announced the execution
of 47 men for terrorist offences in Saudi Arabia.
TV NEWS: 'Saudi Arabia says it has arrested 47 people...'
It was the largest mass execution since 1980.
Whilst many were convicted Al Qaeda terrorists,
several others were political activists.
Ali Nimr was spared for now,
but his uncle, the Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr, was executed.
(PROTESTORS CHANT)
This new footage smuggled out by Yasser's network
in the last few weeks shows how his execution
has sparked the first major protests in the East since the Arab Spring.
(SPEAKS NATIVE LANGUAGE)
The execution of Sheikh Nimr is a signal
that the Saudis were sending not to the Shia only,
but to all dissidents -
secular and Islamic - that they will not tolerate any dissent.
Because they are viscerally opposed to sharing power.
The executions have clearly had an effect
on the activists we've been filming.
Yasser has now been working undercover for six months,
every day risking arrest.
But he tells us that after the executions,
the situation has become too risky to continue.
(SPEAKS NATIVE LANGUAGE)
The elections, billed as a great advance for women's rights,
went ahead.
But women's activist Loujain Hathloul was missing from the ballot.
Definitely, yeah, I'm a troublemaker for them.
That's why they don't really...
Actually, I think it's about me being a very vocal person
about human rights and women's rights.
Unfortunately, the religious establishment is not really aligned
with any of the economic, social
or best interests of the 30 million people living in Saudi Arabia.
Their needs and best interests and voices should be heard.
It will continue to be an issue for the people
and political system until it's resolved.
It's not gonna go away because people are being imprisoned,
or even executed.
A year since Raif Badawi was publicly flogged,
he is still serving out his ten-year sentence.
His wife Ensaf hasn't heard from him since the executions happened.
In response to the film the Foreign Office told us -
MAN: Only by working with Saudi Arabia
can we bring about changes we would like to see.
We regularly raise with them the importance
of compliance with international law,
including in the Yemen conflict.
Senior Saudi leaders have condemned sectarianism and ISIS' ideology.
Our police training undergoes strict assessment
and is designed to improve human rights compliance
of the Saudi justice system. Our arms sales are subject to
one of the most robust export controlregimes in the world.
We are extremely concerned about Raif Badawi
and have raised his case at very senior levels.
The Saudi government has assured us that Ali Nimr will not be executed.
The Saudi Government told us -
MAN: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia utterly rejects the partisan nature
and sensationalist tone of this documentary,
which sets out to portray the country
in a negative and unbalanced light. The Kingdom's legal system
is based on the due process of Islamic Sharia Law.
The Kingdom is at the forefront of international efforts
to combat terrorism and will pursue anyone
who supports and funds terrorist activity,
and to suggest otherwise is a slur. In keeping with its biased agenda,
ITV chose to undertake covert filming
when they could have applied for and received a journalistic visa,
like many of their counterparts.
(GUNSHOT)
Activists say they're being forced underground,
but with the spread of phones and cameras,
it has become impossible
for the regime to control what the world sees.
(GUNFIRE)
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