Claim: A video shows the arrest of an Imam in Saudi Arabia who criticised the current Saudi government for its failing religious policies and the Crown Prince of being an agent of the American and Israeli governments. The Imam was later hanged.
Fact: The video shows an elderly man with a psychological disorder who was escorted out by security personnel after he tried to deliver a Friday sermon. The Medina police issued a statement after the incident saying that the man was later returned to his family..
On 29 May 2025, a user on Facebook posted a video that allegedly showed an Imam being arrested by security personnel from inside a mosque. According to the video’s caption, the Imam allegedly criticised the current Saudi government’s religious policies and of it being an agent for the American and Israeli governments.
Fact or Fiction?
To see if this video actually showed an Imam criticising the Saudi government over its religious policies and diplomatic relations with the United States and Israel, we conducted a reverse-image search of its keyframes. This showed that the video had surfaced on social media as early as 3 March 2018. This Facebook post’s Arabic caption reads that the video shows a preacher of the Friday sermon being taken away by the police after he criticised the Saudi government’s normalisation of diplomatic relations with Israel. Another Facebook post from the same date claimed something similar in its caption, that the preacher of the Friday sermon spoke about Jewish people and corruption, due to which he was arrested. The post appeared again in 2020, where the caption stated the preacher had criticised the Saudi Crown Prince’s religious policies with regards to “openness and corrupt freedoms that God does not approve of”. In 2021, a Facebook post shared the video with the claim that the Imam had “called the current government a religious failure and the current ruler an agent of the US and Israel”. The claim was also shared without verification on X (formerly Twitter) in 2024, by accounts that have circulated multiple false claims in the past.
While this clarified that the video was from 2018, we found a number of articles from Saudi news sources—Shehab News, Okaz, Sabq, Khabarni, and Al Khaleej—that stated that the person being arrested in the video was not an Imam. London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi and Turkish news outlet Anadolu Agency also reported this. The articles contained visuals from the video in the claim and reported that the incident took place in Al-Jabriya Mosque in the city of Yanbu, Saudi Arabia. According to Sabq, Al Khaleej, Al-Quds Al-Arabi, Khabarni, Shehab News, and Anadolu Agency, the country’s Ministry of Islamic Affairs branch in Medina stated that the person who had tried to ascend the pulpit was “mentally ill”.
Sabq also spoke to Abdulrahman Hamid Al-Ahmadi, the “head of awareness at Yanbu Education and preacher at Al-Jabriya Mosque”, who stated that “According to the congregation, a mentally ill man, dressed as a preacher, ascended the pulpit at 12:00 PM”. According to Al-Ahmadi, when he asked the man to come down from the pulpit, he refused and instead started “asking the muezzin to call the adhan”. The person then started “preaching and speaking in an unbalanced manner”, said Al-Ahmadi. According to Sabq, the person was then removed from the pulpit and allowed to perform the Friday prayer, after which he was “calmly taken to the police station to complete the necessary procedures”.
Al-Riyadh shared the official statement of the Medina police on the incident. In the statement, the police spokesperson Major Hussein Al-Qahtani said that the person seen ascending the pulpit and “uttering incoherent phrases” in the video is a citizen in his seventies who “suffers from psychological disorders and has a medical record in a specialized hospital”. According to Al-Qahtani, the man’s “condition requires continuous monitoring” and that he had been handed over to his family. Al-Qahtani’s statement was also quoted by the Saudi news outlet Okaz.
However, apart from Sabq, Al-Riyadh, and Okaz none of the other sources commented on the contents of the man’s speech.
We also found fact-checks about this video by BOOM, Digital Forensics, Research and Analytics Centre (D-FRAC), and NewsMeter—all three of which are signatories to the International Fact Checking Network (IFCN). Based on their investigations, these fact-checks corroborate that the video is from 2018.
Both BOOM and NewsMeter fact-checked claims about the person in the video being removed from the pulpit due to calling for war against Israel. While neither publication was able to ascertain if the person in the video actually said anything of this nature, they also referenced the Ministry of Islamic Affairs’ statement that the man was not an Imam but an elderly man with a psychological disorder.
BOOM also acknowledged that some social media users had posted the video, claiming that the Imam had criticised Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s “modern version of Islam”. D-FRAC fact-checked the claim that the person had spoken against the Crown Prince’s religious policies. This article also quoted the Medina’s police’s statement that the person was “uttering incoherent phrases”.
Virality
On Facebook, the claim was found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Conclusion: The video surfaced online in 2018. It shows an elderly man with a psychological disorder and not an Imam. He was removed by security forces from Al-Jabriya Mosque in Yanbu, Saudi Arabia after attempting to deliver the Friday sermon. According to the Medina police, the man was later returned to his family.
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Background image in cover photo: Fair Observer
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