“Now that I have been granted political asylum [in The Netherlands], I declare my total opposition to the Saudi regime, which has no legitimacy,” Mishaal Zaar Al Mutairi said.

Mutairi said he had joined the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia (MIRA), a London-based Saudi Islamist dissident group led by Saad Al Faqih.

MIRA is the most outspoken opponent of the Saudi regime, calling for demonstrations in Saudi Arabia last October, despite a ban on street protests in the kingdom.

Mutairi, 42, urged other Saudi diplomats to follow suit “in order to help salvage” their country. He said Saudi rulers were “squandering the country’s resources for the benefit of the ruling family and the cronies surrounding it.”

Mutairi applied for asylum in The Netherlands last July, after he was fired.

At the time, Mutairi had been administrative attache in The Hague for three years, although he said his position was actually “official in charge of security affairs.” He worked for the Saudi Arabian diplomatic service from 1982 until he was sacked in April 2003.

In a statement announcing his defection, Mutairi said he had addressed his grievances about “financial and administrative corruption” at the embassy, as well as about the mission’s “penetration at the security and intelligence levels by hostile sides” to the Saudi foreign ministry.

After drawing a blank, Mutairi wrote, he turned to the office of Crown Prince Abdullah Bin Abdel Aziz, which formed a committee to examine his allegations, “but instead of recommending the punishment of those responsible for the corruption and penetration...

I was dismissed and ordered to return home.”

In his remarks to

AFP, Mutairi blamed an embassy counselor for the “penetration” of the embassy, alleging that confidential information had reached “Israeli Arab mercenaries” working for Israel and that “spies from Arab countries hostile to Saudi Arabia” had been hired as employees.AFP