King Fahd of Saudi Arabia is giving urgent consideration to an appeal for the release of two British nurses jailed since December 1996 over a murder case, the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, said in Jeddah yesterday.
"What the Crown Prince [Abdallah ibn Abdel Aziz] indicated to me was that the families themselves had petitioned the king here for mercy and also that they would give that very serious consideration," Mr Blair said.
The British prime minister met both the Saudi monarch and the crown prince for talks on Saturday which also focused on boosting Britain's trade with the Saudis. The appeal, from the families of Ms Lucille McLauchlan and Ms Deborah Parry rather than the British government, allows London to avoid any charges of interference in the workings of the Saudi judicial system.
The Parry family yesterday gave a cautious welcome to Mr Blair's comments. "We are grateful to Mr Blair for presenting the plea on our behalf," her brother-in-law, Mr Jonathan Ashbee, said. " `Serious consideration' is a political-type phrase, and to my mind seems a positive political-type phrase. How positive it is depends on what comes next."
Ms Parry (40), of Alton, Hampshire, is awaiting a verdict in her trial before an Islamic court for the murder of an Australian colleague, Yvonne Gilford, at a hospital in Dhahran, eastern Saudi Arabia. Ms McLauchlan (32), from Dundee, is appealing her sentence of eight years in jail and 500 lashes for complicity in Gilford's murder.