A rare glimpse into Saudi prison for convicted terrorists

Except for the machine guns and guard towers, the al-Hair high-security prison in Saudi Arabia looks remarkably like a hotel - especially the facility's conjugal-visit wing.

Beyond a heavy iron gate, its bars painted a cheerful lavender, a red carpet stretches the length of a long hallway, where each of the 38 private cells has a queen-size bed, a fridge, a television and a shower.

Here, just around the corner from the prison ATM, married inmates are allowed to spend three to five private hours with their wives at least once a month, with fresh linens and tea and sweets on the nightstand.

Nearly 1,100 high-security prisoners, all of them jailed on terrorism-related charges, are serving time in this prison a few kilometres south of Riyadh. Al-Hair is the largest of five high-security Saudi prisons established in the past decade to deal with a growing terrorism threat, first from al-Qaeda and more recently from the Islamic State.

Saudi prisons have long been largely off-limits to journalists and human rights monitors. But officials said Interior Minister Mohammed bin Nayef, has ordered that journalists be allowed to visit, hoping to refute allegations from rights groups that Saudi Arabia tortures prisoners.

So on a recent Sunday afternoon, Warden Mohammed al-Ahmed led a rare visit inside the al-Hair prison.

"We have nothing to hide," he said. "Point at any building, point at any cell. You can see anything you want to see."