The Saad al-Jabri family - a former senior Saudi intelligence official - has called on the government and lawmakers in the United States to press for the release of their two sons arrested in Saudi Arabia.
The Financial Times said that the family does not know whether Omar and Sara (Najla al-Jabri) are still alive after the Saudi authorities arrested them in a raid on her house in Riyadh.
The newspaper said that Riyadh arrested Omar and Sarah in the middle of last March, and the al-Jabri family believed they were being held as hostages, to force their father, who lives in self-imposed exile in Canada, to return to the Kingdom.
It quoted Khaled al-Jabri, the other son of Saad, as saying that the al-Jabri family, in the hope of securing the release of Sarah and Omar, was dealing with the Canadian and American governments and making congressional tours.
Khaled, a cardiologist who lives with his father in Toronto, told the press late last month that his 21-year-old brother and 20-year-old sister Sara had been arrested and imprisoned as a way to pressure their father to return to the kingdom from exile in Canada.
The newspaper said that the issue of Omar and Sarah is receiving increasing attention due to their father's previous ties with Western governments and security and intelligence agencies in America and Britain, and it has again highlighted the authoritarian rule of Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman.
The newspaper also quoted Al-Jabri's son as saying that his family was targeted because of his father's previous close relationship with former Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.
Estrangement and causes
And the Washington Post had reported about two weeks ago in an article by writer David Ignacius - that the rupture between Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman and Saad al-Jabri came after the latter's attendance - on the orders of former Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef - a meeting with the CIA director at the time John Brennan, and another meeting in London with then British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond.
The newspaper pointed out that the dispute between Prince Muhammad bin Salman and al-Jabri was also due to the latter's strong warning of the Yemen war.
The newspaper quoted Saudi and British sources that Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed warned Muhammad bin Salman - during his visit to Abu Dhabi in 2015 - that al-Jabri might have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, which was denied by former US and British intelligence officials.
For his part, Khaled al-Jabri refuted this claim, and stated that his father is a devout Muslim, asking, "How can the targeted person by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood at the same time? It is a preposterous claim."