The story of an American detained in Qatar for "espionage"

For more than 13 years, John Wesley Downs, 62, a geophysicist from Arkansas, has been incarcerated in Qatar, a tiny but affluent Persian Gulf emirate. He was arrested in 2005 and sentenced to life on a spying conviction for plotting to sell information about the country’s vast natural-gas deposits to Iran, The New York Times reported.

He is the only American in the prison, a two-story building in the desert that houses a motley collection of offenders, Qatari and foreign, separated by gender.

While working in the country as a staff geologist for Qatar Petroleum, the national energy company, Mr. Downs tried in 2005 to secretly trade what he described as useless information on Qatar’s enormous gas reserves to Iran in exchange for $20,000, which he said he needed to help pay his eldest child’s college tuition.

At the time, Mr. Downs and his defense lawyers said, he was financially strapped. He had also decided to move to Saudi Arabia for a higher-paying job. That decision so angered Qatar Petroleum executives, his lawyers said, that the company canceled a bonus owed to Mr. Downs, which he deeply resented.

Attributing his decision to irrational judgment caused by money problems, Mr. Downs said that in hindsight, “I never had the courage or gumption to hand anything over to those guys.”

Mr. Downs’s story has also shone a spotlight on what critics call Qatar’s opaque judicial system, which gave him little opportunity to defend himself during a trial conducted in Arabic, which he does not understand. Neither his family nor American consular officials were permitted to attend most of the proceeding, and his lawyers at the time did little to challenge the prosecution.

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