May 31st, 2020
Richard Clark
(Thanks to Richard Clark of Capital Punishment U.K. for the guest post, a reprinted section from a longer article about capital punishment in Kuwait that was originally published on that site. (Executed Today has taken the liberty of adding some explanatory links.) CapitalPunishmentUK.org features a trove of research and feature articles on the death penalty in England and elsewhere, including a wider history of the juvenile death penalty in England. -ed.)
On the 31st of May 2004, three executions were carried out simultaneously at 8.15 a.m. in the courtyard of the Nayef Palace. The criminals, two Saudi nationals, Marzook Saad Suleiman Al-Saeed, aged 25, Saeed Saad Suleiman Al-Saeed, aged 28 and 24 year old Kuwaiti Hamad Mubarak Turki Al-Dihani, had been convicted of the abduction, rape and murder of a six year old girl.
It was a particularly appalling crime that had received a great deal of media coverage. Their victim, Amna Al-Khaledi, was kidnapped from her home on the 1st of May 2002 and driven to a remote desert area, where she was gang raped and stabbed five times in the chest before her throat was slit. The three men were arrested some three weeks after Amna’s body was discovered. They had murdered Amna in a so called honour killing to avenge a sexual relationship between her elder brother, Adel Al-Khaledi, and Al-Saeed’s sister. Amna’s brother was given a five-year prison term for having the illicit sexual relationship.
(Honour killings are committed to avenge a perceived affront to a family’s honour, such as an out of wedlock relationship or a female relative marrying without her parents’ consent.)
A third Saudi, Latifa Mandil Suleiman Al-Saeed, a 21-year-old female cousin of the two brothers, was sentenced to life in prison for taking part in the abduction.
Some 1,000 people, including Amna’s relatives, were at Nayef Palace to see the aftermath of the executions according to Interior Ministry spokesman Lt. Col. Adel Al-Hashshash. Incongruous photographs appeared in the press the next day showing the hanging bodies with Kuwaiti women in full Islamic dress taking photos of them with their state of the art mobile phones. The bodies were taken down some 20 minutes after the execution and covered with white sheets. The head of the Penal Execution Department, Najeeb Al-Mulla, announced that it took Hamad Al-Dehani approximately 6 minutes to die, while the two Saudi brothers were timed was 8½ minutes and 5½ minutes respectively. Saeed Al-Saeed and Marzouq Al-Saeed had asked for their remains to be buried in Saudi Arabia and the three convicted asked for the authorities to donate a charity project in their names.
On this day..
- 1729: Philippe Nivet, "Fanfaron" - 2019
- 1431: Beaumont and Vivonne - 2018
- 1996: Four militants, ahead of the Khobar Towers bombing - 2017
- 1509: Four Dominicans for the Jetzer affair - 2016
- 1915: Kassim Ismail Mansoor, purveyor of coffee and treason - 2015
- 2000: Robert Earl Carter, exonerating Anthony Graves - 2014
- 1793: Ezra Mead, "in one of these fits of insanity" - 2013
- 1928: Frederick Browne and Pat Kennedy, hanged by a microscope - 2012
- 1841: Marius Darmes, frustrated regicide - 2011
- 1622: Not quite Squanto (Tisquantum), Pilgrim befriender - 2010
- 1076: Waltheof II, Earl of Northumbria - 2009
- 1718: John "Jack Ketch" Price, former hangman - 2008
Entry Filed under: 21st Century,Capital Punishment,Crime,Death Penalty,Execution,Guest Writers,Hanged,Kuwait,Murder,Other Voices,Sex
Tags: 2000s, 2004, amna al-khaledi, family, hamad mubarak turki al-dihani, honor killing, marzook saad suleiman al-saeed, may 31, saeed saad suleiman al-saeed
January 25th, 2017
Headsman
A sheikh, and six others much less exalted hanged this morning in Kuwait.
Garnering most of the headlines, Sheikh Faisal Abdullah al-Jaber al-Sabah — the first Kuwaiti royal ever put to death — shot an equally royal nephew dead in 2010.
He was one of only two actual Kuwaitis among the seven hanged; the population of the oil-rich Gulf emirate is more than half comprised of foreign nationals at any given time. The other Kuwaiti was a woman, Nasra al-Enezi, who vengefully set fire to a wedding tent when her husband took a second wife. More than 50 people reportedly died in the blaze.
The Philippines was exercised over the fate of its national, Jakatia Pawa — a domestic worker condemned for stabbing her employer’s adult daughter to death. Kuwait is the sixth-largest destination for the vast expatriate labor sector known as Overseas Filipino/a Workers (OFWs).
An Ethiopian maid, unnamed in the press reports that I have been able to find, was also convicted of murder, as were two Egyptians. The seventh to go to the scaffold today was a Bangladeshi man condemned for a non-fatal kidnapping and rape.
Human rights organizations were naturally aghast, with Human Rights Watch denouncing the mass hanging — on the heels of capital punishment resumptions in Jordan and Bahrain — as part of an “alarming trend in the region for countries to return to or increasingly use the death penalty.”
On this day..
- 1774: John Malcom, tarred and feathered - 2020
- 1358: Perrin Mace, de-sanctuaried - 2019
- 1830: Benito de Soto, a pirate hanged at Gibraltar - 2018
- c. 1560: Dominique Phinot, queer composer - 2016
- 1788: John Price Posey, "superlative villain" - 2015
- 1928: Ben “Two Gun” Fowler, cinema shooter - 2014
- 2010: Chemical Ali - 2013
- 1971: Ousmane Balde, Barry III, Magassouba Moriba, Loffo Camara, Keita Kara Soufiana, and many others in Conakry - 2012
- 1911: Sugako Kanno, radical feminist - 2011
- 1996: Billy Bailey, the last American hanged - 2010
- Daily Double: Throwback Executions - 2010
- 1795: Unspecified Robespierrists - 2009
- 1663: Nathaniel Greensmith, Rebecca Greensmith and possibly Mary Barnes, Connecticut "witches" - 2008
Entry Filed under: 21st Century,Arson,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,Disfavored Minorities,Execution,Hanged,Kidnapping,Kuwait,Mass Executions,Murder,Racial and Ethnic Minorities,Rape,Ripped from the Headlines,Royalty,Women
Tags: 2010s, 2017, january 25, literally executed today
November 28th, 2014
Headsman
Sri Lankan national Sanjaya Rowan Kumara was hanged on this date in 2006 at Kuwait’s Central Prison for murdering a woman while robbing her house.
He was pronounced dead and cut down within eight minutes. But …
medics who transported his body to a morgue said they noticed he was still moving, Al-Qabas daily reported.
Forensic experts were immediately called to examine the body and they confirmed that “there was some weak pulse in his heart,” the daily said.
The examination was repeated several times and each time “the dead body showed some signs of life,” Al-Qabas quoted unnamed medical sources as saying.
“They eventually pronounced him completely dead at 1400 hours local time,” five hours after his hanging, the sources said.
The justice ministry refused to comment on the report but head of the criminal execution department, Najeeb al-Mulla, who supervised the hanging, told Al-Watan newspaper the report was “baseless.”
On this day..
- 1499: Edward, Earl of Warwick, the last Plantagenet claimant - 2019
- 1857: Two surviving members of the Aiken Party - 2018
- 1405: Astorre I Manfredi, former lord of Faenza - 2017
- 1798: Dennis Nugent, for child rape - 2016
- 764: St. Stephen the Younger, iconodule martyr - 2015
- 2008: Wo Weihan, spy? - 2013
- 1828: James "Little Jim" Guild - 2012
- 1721: Cartouche, French bandit - 2011
- 1783: Johanna Catharina Höhn, by Goethe's vote - 2010
- 1871: Louis Rossel, Théophile Ferré, and Sergeant Bourgeois, Communards - 2009
- 1950: James Corbitt, the hangman's mate - 2008
- 1922: Six Greek former ministers of state - 2007
Entry Filed under: 21st Century,Botched Executions,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,Disfavored Minorities,Execution,Executions Survived,Hanged,Kuwait,Murder,Racial and Ethnic Minorities,Theft
Tags: 2000s, 2006, november 28, sanjaya rowan kumara
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