A photo of Abdulrahman al-Khalid that was distributed at a demonstration calling for his release in March in Sofia.
Saudi dissident and human rights activist Abdulrahman al-Khalidi was freed on Friday, having spent almost five years in administrative detention in Bulgaria after he was designated as a threat to public security.
“Abdulrahman has just been freed following a modification of the control measure,” activist and publisher Victor Lilov. who has long campaigned for al-Khalidi’s release, confirmed to BIRN.
The Bulgarian Helsinki Committee NGO, which also confirmed al-Khalidi’s release, described his four years and ten months of custody as “one of the most prolonged cases of detention of an asylum seeker in Bulgaria”.
Al-Khalidi has been kept in detention centres in Bulgaria since October 2021 and has reportedly been subjected to beatings by police, suffered from dire living conditions and a lack of transparency over the reasons for his detention.
For most of this time, he was held in the Butmantsi Detention Centre on the outskirts of the Bulgarian capital Sofia. In January 2026 he was transferred to a temporary accommodation centre for foreigners in Lyubimets, near the border with Turkey.
“After almost five years of detention, this is an extremely important moment … Thank you for standing with me throughout all these years,” al-Khalidi wrote to supporters on Facebook as he was being transferred from Lyubimets to Sofia’s Migration Directorate.
Al-Khalidi’s lawyer, Diana Radoslavova from the Voice in Bulgaria Centre for Legal Aid, explained to BIRN that his release happened because he was about to compete the maximum term for which people can be held in migration detention, 18 months. He had previously been held in asylum detention.
Radoslavova was with al-Khalidi after he was released. She said the first thing he did was speak with his wife and children.
“He’s doing extremely surprisingly well, for me. He’s psychologically a very strong person because this is not an easy transition for him,” she said.
Al-Khalidi became politically active in Saudi Arabia around the time of the Arab Spring protests. Interviewed by BIRN in 2024, he explained that political arrests, often followed by death sentences, were frequent in late 2012 to early 2013. That is why he decided to leave the country in 2013.
He continued his activism abroad, also working as a journalist writing articles critical of the Saudi government. According to Human Rights Watch, he was part of late Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s movement, called the Bees Army, which sought to counter pro-Saudi government propaganda.
After leaving Saudi Arabia, he lived in exile in Qatar, Egypt and Turkey, where his wife, son and daughter still live.
In 2021 his Saudi documents were about to expire. The only way to renew them would have been to enter the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, the same embassy where Khashoggi was killed in 2018. To avoid Saudi officials, he decided to apply for asylum at the Bulgarian border. That is when Bulgarian authorities first placed him in detention in response to information passed on by the State Agency for National Security that the applicant posed a national security threat.
In April 2024, despite the Supreme Administrative Court in Sofia’s decision that he was eligible to receive asylum, the State Refugee Agency and the State Agency for National Security continued to keep him detained on the grounds that he was a threat to public security.
His case has been taken to the European Court of Human Rights, where a verdict is still awaited. In March 2026, 18 MEPs wrote an official letter to the Bulgarian government expressing concerns regarding his detention conditions and calling on Bulgaria to comply with legal decisions.
In recent years, multiple instances of Bulgaria denying asylum or deporting people under questionable conditions have come to light, as well as cases of police brutality, such as recent allegations of widespread violence against migrants being held in a detention centre in Pastrogor.