By Anthony Harwood

A cross-dressing gunman filmed carrying out a robbery in Saudi Arabia in which a policeman was killed is too tall to be a 14-year-old boy on Death Row for the crime, say campaigners.

The human rights charity, Reprieve, believe the attack was carried out by an adult man dressed as woman – not a child who it claims CCTV cameras show was playing football at the time.

Abdullah al-Howaiti was just 14 when he was arrested for robbing the al-Sa’di jewelery shop in the coastal town on Duba in 2017, and shooting dead a policeman who had raced to the scene.

The teenager, now 19, says he was tortured into confessing the crime after his feet were whipped with electric wire and made to stand for hours until he passed out, beaten and threatened to have his fingernails pulled out.

He claims he was even forced to participate in the torture of his brother.

Jeed Basyouni, who lead’s Reprieve’s Middle East and North Africa work, said: “It couldn’t be clearer watching the footage that this is a professional thief, not a 14 year old kid.

“The man in this security camera footage is carrying a machine gun as well as a handgun as he robs more than $200,000 (£165,000) in gold and then steals a police car to flee the scene of the crime.

“Court documents also confirm that CCTV cameras show that Abdullah was playing football on the seafront when the crime took place, so he would have to have been in two places at once to have carried out the offence.

“Put simply, Abdullah couldn’t have committed this crime.”

Video footage shows the deranged cross-dressing gunman bursting into the shop causing another customer to flee before threatening the shopkeeper who he finds cowering behind the counter.

He is later filmed walking out of the store with a bag full of valuables after shooting dead the policeman before driving off in the officer’s car which was found abandoned 20 miles away.

Investigators say the car was a manual Jeep and Abdullah had only learned to drive an automatic car six months before his arrest.

Campaigners also claim Abdullah was still kicking a ball about with friends an hour after the raid and so could not have killed the policeman or made off in the getaway car.

Following his death sentence his family wrote to Lewis Hamilton to plead for his help when Formula One returned to Saudi Arabia.

They said: “Abdullah was just a boy when he was taken from us – a 14-year-old who loved playing football and riding his bicycle. Police officers with guns entered our family home and abducted him and his brother.

“They accused him of shooting a policeman dead after robbing a jewelery store. See for yourself! Does the person in this video of the robbery look like a young teenage boy or a professional thief?”

Abdullah’s sentence came after Saudi Arabia announced it would stop putting people on Death Row for crimes committed when they were children.

The case was picked up by British MPs who wrote to the Saudi Embassy in London saying it was “causing profound concern in the international community”.

The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention also called for Abdullah’s immediate release and asked for Saudi Arabia to abide by the Convention of the Rights of the Child, which prohibits the death penalty for children.

On March 12th Saudi Arabia executed 81 men in a single day, its largest mass execution in years.