The latest case of a lone teenage Saudi air traveller being denied entry and sent back to his home country is likely a copycat act of the Rahaf Mohammed al-Qunun case, a source at the Immigration Bureau said on Wednesday.
The Saudi teenager last month captured global headlines after barricading herself in a Thai hotel room and mounting a social media campaign to avoid forcible repatriation. She eventually secured refugee status and was resettled in Canada.
She fled from Kuwait to Thailand on her way to Australia before she ended up as a refugee in Canada.
In the latest case, 14-year-old Ahmad Hassan Basheeri, who forged a document to fly to Thailand, has been reunited with his family.
The Immigration Bureau source said the boy was denied entry because he was too young to travel alone and the airlines should not have allowed him on a plane in the first place.
According to gulfnews.com, the eighth grade student in a middle school in Samtah in southwestern Saudi Arabia, repeatedly told classmates that he wanted to travel abroad.
The school management alerted his father about the plans he shared with classmates.
Ahmad, who has a passport logged into a pre-travel account for minors and posing as his father, gave permission for himself to travel abroad alone. He used the authorisation to book a ticket from Jizan to Jeddah, then onward to Kuwait, Doha and Bangkok.
One day before the scheduled flights, Ahmad opened an account on Twitter and posted that he was a victim of domestic abuse and that he faced death threats.
However, when Ahmad landed in Thailand, he was refused an entry visa since he was under-age and was sent back to Qatar, Saudi daily Al Madinah reported.
The boy's father informed authorities who tracked his travels.
