Saudi prince found guilty of murdering servant

LONDON // A Saudi Arabian prince was convicted yesterday of murdering his servant at a fashionable London hotel.

It took a jury at the Old Bailey only 95 minutes to find Prince Saud Abdulaziz bin Nasser Al Saud, 34, guilty of the “sadistic” murder of the servant, Bandar Abdulaziz, in February.

The prince faces a life sentence, the minimum period of which will be set by the judge later.

Although the prince did not deny killing Abdulaziz, 32, in the suite they shared at the Landmark Hotel in London, his lawyers said the death was an accident.

They also denied prosecution claims that the pair had a homosexual relationship.

But the jury accepted the prosecution case that Abdulaziz, a Saudi orphan raised by a low-ranking family of civil servants, had been subjected to so many previous beatings that he had let the prince punch, bite and fatally strangle him after a night’s drinking.

Prince Abdulaziz, Al Saud’s father, watched from the public gallery as the verdict was returned. Visibly shaken, he was attended by a court medic before being driven away.

dsapsted@thenational.ae