Saudi Babylon : Torture, Corruption and Cover-Up Inside the House of Saud (Rev. and updated [ed.])

When Sandy Mitchell was arrested for his alleged involvement in two bombings in Saudi Arabia in December 2000, he thought it was a case of mistaken identity and that he would soon be released.

Instead, he spent nearly three years in jail, where he was repeatedly tortured before being forced to sign a confession and admit his guilt on Saudi television.

Throughout his incarceration the Saudi authorities knew that the attacks had been committed by al-Qaeda militants.

Yet they kept Mitchell in jail and refused him access to a lawyer for a year.

By this time he had been sentenced to death but he was eventually released before the penalty could be imposed. "Saudi Babylon" is the story of a shocking miscarriage of justice.

But, it also reveals an even more disturbing truth: how the British government, mindful of multi-billion-pound arms sales to Saudi Arabia, virtually abandoned Mitchell by adopting a softly-softly diplomatic approach to the corrupt Saudi royal family. Based on diaries and records of meetings with ministers and officials, this is a powerful expose of how the British government acts when one of its citizens is illegally imprisoned and tortured by a regime with which it does business.