Kausar Uddin describes his Saudi jail ordeal

An Edinburgh man who claims he was wrongly imprisoned during a Mecca pilgrimage has described his ordeal in an overcrowded Saudi jail.

Kausar Uddin, 48, from Broomhouse, said he was "petrified" in the Mecca prison as other inmates fought and screamed.

He was sentenced to 35 days for assaulting a policeman in February but ended up spending four months in jail.

Mr Uddin says he had lost his balance and grabbed hold of the nearest person, who happened to be a policeman.

After his release from prison, he was put under house arrest in Saudi Arabia for a further six months before his passport was returned to him and he was allowed to fly back to Scotland.

'Chest pains'

He told the BBC Scotland news website that during the first three weeks of his incarceration he was put in a cell with 500 other prisoners.

He said: "We were so crammed in that you couldn't see the ground and I couldn't sleep.

"There were only about 10 of us who didn't smoke so the room was so thick with smoke that you couldn't see people's faces. The smoke gave me serious chest pains and it burned my eyes.

"People were fighting and screaming all the time so I was petrified as some were dangerous.

"There were people who were very aggressive, there was no control and it made me very worried. I also couldn't speak Arabic so I didn't know what was going on or what the food was that we were given."

Mr Uddin was later transferred to a non-smoking cell, which held about 300 prisoners.

Second-class citizen

He said you could pay £3 a night for a two-inch thick mat that was the width of a single bed and shared by two people.

His family sent money to the jail so he could have a mat.

He said he would sometimes be thrown off the mat by other inmates, who treated him like a "second-class citizen" because he was unable to speak the language.

The cell was also very hot and they washed their clothes in the toilet sink or could pay 50p to have their clothes washed by the prison laundry service.

Mr Uddin had been on a two-week pilgrimage with his wife and children when he was arrested.

He said: "The police beat me up. They were slapping me and punching me while one choked me by pulling very hard on the back of my collar like I was being hanged.

"I was then taken to hospital with facial injuries for three hours before being put in jail.

"I was begging the policeman saying I wouldn't press charges for being assaulted if they would just let me go because I was so worried about what my wife and children would do without me.

"When they still sent me to jail when I had done nothing wrong I felt very shocked. I felt very upset too when I found I had no human rights in there."

Business sold

During his 10 months away, Mr Uddin's family had to sell his takeaway business because it accrued so many debts while it remained shut.

He has also had to re-sit his taxi licence exam because it had elapsed, and he nearly lost his house.

He now has nightmares that he is still in the jail or that he cannot return home, and said the trauma had taken a psychological toll on his children.

Mr Uddin finally returned to Edinburgh three weeks ago.

"We didn't celebrate, the trauma had been too great, we just felt huge relief," he said.

Mr Uddin said he was disappointed with the lack of help from the Foreign Office and from the Blackhall Mosque officials who organised the trip to Mecca.

A Foreign Office spokeswoman said: "Our staff provided assistance to a British national in Saudi Arabia following their arrest in February 2016, including being in regular contact with their family and local authorities."