Last year on this date, Saudi Arabia’s execution wave consumed a Burmese woman named Laila Bint Abdul Muttalib Basim.
Condemned for the murder and sexual abuse of her seven-year-old stepdaughter, Basim went to her public beheading protesting her innocence and resisting in whatever way she could — which we know, because a cell phone recording of the execution attained worldwide dissemination. In it, the black-shrouded condemned shrieks over and over, “I did not kill! This is unjust!” She denounces her executioners, invokes the Shahada … until her throat is horrifically emptied of its last protest by the blade.
Warning: This is the on-camera death of a human being from just a few meters’ distance, obtained via Liveleak. It’s awful.
Thanks to the outrage this video spawned, a “human rights organization” underwritten by the Saudi government demanded the arrest of the person who recorded the video … which did indeed occur.
On this day..
- 1861: Antonino Aberastain
- 1934: Surya Sen
- 1949: Margaret "Bill" Allen, transgender
- 1830: Agnes Magnusdottir and Fridrik Sigurdsson, Iceland's last executions
- 1874: Three for misshapen love
- 1864: Samuel Wright, by contrast
- 1400: Sir Thomas Blount, "bowels burning before him"
- 1629: Anna Gurren, in the Mergentheimer Hexenprozess
- 2010: Gary Johnson
- 1959: 71 after the Cuban Revolution
- 1928: Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray
- 1951: Albert Guay