Category Archives: Saudi Arabia

2005: Six surprised Somalis

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Six Somali migrant workers were publicly beheaded in Jeddah on this date in 2005 for robbing taxi drivers. The muggings, though violent, were not fatal to the drivers, so the punishment was quite harsh even by the harsh standards of KSA.

According to an Amnesty International researcher, the doomed men had not been “informed in advance that their five-year prison sentences, which they had served — and also been lashed — by May 2004, had apparently been changed later to death sentences by a secret procedure.” They were unaware until the morning of their execution that they had even been condemned to death.

Their names were Ali Sheikh Yusuf, Abdel-Fatar Ali Hassan, Abdullah Adam Abdullah, Hussein Haroon Mohamed, Abdul-Nur Mohamed Wali and Abdullah Hassan Abdu.

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2013: Abdullah Fandi Al-Shammary, long time coming

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On this date in 2013, the longest-serving (or -waiting) condemned prisoner in Saudi Arabia was beheaded for a murder committed 32 years prior.

Per media reports, he bludgeoned another man to death during a neighborhood brawl in Ha’il around the age of 21. Initially convicted of manslaughter, he paid a “blood money” fine and was released. He got married and resumed his life.

But two years after that — this seems to be about seven or eight years after the homicide — relatives of the victim convinced Saudi authorities to re-arrest Al-Shammary for murder, and this re-trial brought a death sentence.

Only after all the dead man’s heirs could come of age and all refuse offers of blood money to pardon him could he be put to death. Although he could not win the pity of these family members, he gained quite a lot of sympathy in Saudi Arabia since he essentially lived a lifetime on death row — reportedly a model prisoner who memorized the Quran and led his fellow prisoners in the dawn prayer of his last day on earth.

Ha’il Gov. Prince Abdul Aziz bin Saad bin Abdul Aziz personally interceded with an unsuccessful attempt to convince those heirs to pardon Al-Shammary; upon the latter’s execution donors gave his family a house and one million Saudi riyal (about a quarter-million dollars) in cash.

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2016: Nimr al-Nimr, Shiite cleric

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On this date in 2016, Saudi Arabia beheaded Shiite Muslim cleric Nimr al-Nimr (familiarly known as Sheikh Nimr) — one of 47 executions carried out in 12 cities throughout the kingdom that included at least four political prisoners (one of them al-Nimr) as well as two foreign nationals.

A prominent dissident who became an emblem of resistance in his predominantly Shiite province of Al-Awamiyah*, al-Nimr had been arrested several times before without blunting his sharp tongue. “People must rejoice at his death,” he offered in June 2012, about the death of militant Wahhabist crown prince Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud. “He will be eaten by worms and will suffer the torments of Hell in his grave.”

But here in the terrestrial sphere, Nayef’s death made Salman the crown prince … and queued up Salman’s son, Mohammad bin Salman to become the de facto ruler of the kingdom.

Al-Nimr was seized in July 2012, during crackdowns** on the 2011-2012 “Arab Spring” protests — shot in the leg during the course of his arrest and beaten bloody by his captors. This arrest itself brought thousands into the streets, at least two of whom were shot dead in their own turn as al-Nimr went on hunger strike. By the time al-Nimr was put up on charges in 2014, the aforementioned Mohammad bin Salman — “MbS” of dread popular parlance, infamous for his bonesaws — was well along his rise to power in Saudi Arabia as the hand and the heir who transacted the business of a dementia-addled prince.

Al-Nimr’s October 2014 death sentence for “seeking ‘foreign meddling’ in the kingdom, ‘disobeying’ its rulers and taking up arms against the security forces” drew worldwide condemnation and protests over the ensuing year, a year coinciding with MbS’s overt conquest of political power in Saudi Arabia.

The execution sparked global outrage of varying hues, most sharply from Shiite Iran, where angry protesters attacked the Saudi embassy: not the decisive event but emblematic of Saudi Arabia’s growing enmity with Iran that shapes regional conflicts from Yemen to Iraq to Syria.

* Adjacent to the similarly restive Sunni-ruled, Shiite-majority Gulf monarchy of Bahrain.

** Al-Nimr’s nephew, Ali Mohammed Baqir al-Nimr, is still under a death sentence today that could be ratified by the sovereign at any time. He was arrested in February 2012 for anti-regime protests, when he was only 17 years old.

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2011: Amina bint Abdul Halim bin Salem Nasser

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Per the BBC’s report of a Saudi Interior Ministry statement, a woman named Amina bint Abdul Halim bin Salem Nasser was beheaded for sorcery in the northern province of Jawf on this date in 2011.

The London-based newspaper, al-Hayat, quoted a member of the religious police as saying that she was in her 60s and had tricked people into giving her money, claiming that she could cure their illnesses.

Our correspondent said she was arrested in April 2009.

But the human rights group Amnesty International, which has campaigned for Saudis previously sentenced to death on sorcery charges, said it had never heard of her case until now, he adds.

…

Amnesty says that Saudi Arabia does not actually define sorcery as a capital offence. However, some of its conservative clerics have urged the strongest possible punishments against fortune-tellers and faith healers as a threat to Islam.

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2016: Prince Turki bin Saud al-Kadir

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On this date in 2016, Saudi Arabia had Prince Turki bin Saud al-Kabir beheaded: the first royal executed in the kingdom since 1975.

Prince Turki was convicted of shooting to death a friend named Adel bin Suleiman bin Abdulkareem Al-Muhaimeed during a 2012 brawl outside Riyadh.

Victims’ families have the right to pardon condemned criminals in Saudi Arabia, but Adel’s family refused repeated offers of diya (blood money) from the royal relatives up to the very last moment.

“The greatest thing is that the citizen sees the law applied to everyone, and that there are not big people and other small people,” Abdul-Rahman al-Lahim, a prominent Saudi lawyer, wrote on Twitter.

–New York Times

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2011: Ruyati binti Sapubi, migrant worker beheaded on film

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Indonesian migrant worker Ruyati binti Sapubi was beheaded in Mecca on this date in 2011 for the meat cleaver murder of her mistress. She numbered among the several hundred thousand Indonesian women hired as domestic servants in the Gulf kingdom.

“The maid carried out the killing after she was denied permission to leave the kingdom and return to her family in Indonesia, according to officials in Jakarta,” according to press reports on the very sketchy details allowed by Riyadh.

The mild and passive voice here conveys a wild overreaction by the help, but a moment’s consideration of the scenario — a terribly vulnerable imported domestic worker disallowed from leaving her job — puts matters into a different light. (To add diplomatic insult to injury, the Saudis failed to inform Indonesia when the actual execution was imminent.)

Indeed, just days after the execution, word leaked of a Sri Lankan domestic who had been secretly held in outright slavery for 14 years.

Mature Content: The execution was secretly recorded. This is a snuff film.

The Indonesian government slapped an immediate moratorium on overseas work in Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of this horror. Unfortunately, these and similar measures in the 2010s have only compounded the risk of trafficking, increasing the vulnerability of people desperate to secure work abroad.

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1996: Four militants, ahead of the Khobar Towers bombing

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On this date in 1996, Saudi Arabia beheaded four Muslim militants for a car bomb attack on the Office of Program Management for the Saudi Arabian National Guard (OPM-SANG) military facility at Riyadh, killing five U.S. nationals and two Indians. All four prisoners were Sunni veterans of the Afghan War against the USSR, but they were beheaded in great haste, the Saudis having refused U.S. investigators permission to interview them.

The Kingdom’s Interior Ministry remarked at the time that the executions ought to assure that “such repulsive acts would not be repeated.”

This fanciful aspiration was conclusively nullified 25 days later when a huge truck bomb blew apart an apartment complex being used by the U.S. military, killing 19 U.S. Air Force servicemen along with a Saudi: the Khobar Towers bombing,* a bin Laden operation which might have opened an opportunity to prosecute the terrorist back before 9/11 was a twinkling in his salt-and-pepper beard, had the U.S. FBI not expediently attributed Khobar Towers to Iran-backed Shia militants.

* The 1996 truck bombing is not to be confused with the 2004 Khobar massacre.

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2015: Siti Zainab

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On this date in 2015, in the Islamic holy city of Medina, Saudi Arabia beheaded Indonesian domestic worker Siti Zainab after a very long wait.

Zainab, a maid, was condemned to death in 1999 for stabbing to death her cruel* employer. Her execution went on pause for more than 15 years until all of the victim’s children could reach adulthood and exercise their right to enforce or mitigate the death sentence; still, for all that lead time, Saudi Arabia irked Jakarta by failing to notify consular offices of her impending beheading.

In addition to the usual controversies Saudi Arabia’s aggressive headsmen engender when dispatching the kingdom’s widely abused migrant workers, Zainab’s case raised hackles over the condemned woman’s alleged “suspected mental illness.”

* Cruel according to Zainab and her defenders. Indonesian NGO Migrant Care argued that the murder was outright self-defense.

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2014: Ismai Khan Sayed, a Pakistani heroin smuggler in Saudi Arabia

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On this date in 2014, Saudi Arabia beheaded Ismail Khan Sayed for smuggling “a large amount” of heroin into the kingdom.

Despite (or because of) its strict sharia mores, Saudi Arabia has developed a national appetite for mind-altering substances. It’s an epidemic that the kingdom’s busy headsmen have been detailed to address on the supply side, although of course the treatment for foreign gofers like Sayed differs markedly from that of the many drug-addled royals who enjoy the product.

“Most of our shit originates in Afghanistan,” a Saudi drug dealer told Vice in 2013. “It’s a long chain of selling that starts with nomads in Afghani fields. They grow it, then it gets hidden between crates away from the mutawa [the religious police -ed.] and goes from seller to seller like a spider web.”

For hashish as well as heroin sourced to Afghanistan, Pakistani couriers play an essential role in that web — even if they are eminently disposable individually. They have had a growing prominence in Saudi Arabia’s frequent execution bulletins: Sayed was the 12th Pakistani drug mule executed in Saudi Arabia in a two-month span at the end of 2014; there have been (and continue to be) many more since.

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2015: A day in the death penalty around the world

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China

The People’s Court of Gansu executed former elementary school teacher Li Jishun for a spree of sexually assaulting 26 girls ages 4 to 12 in his care in 2011-2012.

“He took advantage of his status as teacher to repeatedly rape and molest the young girls, concealing his crimes and making it more difficult for his victims to resist and expose him,” China’s Supreme Court said in upholding the sentence.

China’s Xinhua news agency has reported that child sexual assault cases are on the rise by some 40%, but Li’s crimes carried an especially painful resonance: many of the victims had been given up to these school dormitories by parents who were compelled to leave impoverished Gansu to seek work in the cities.

Pakistan

Pakistan, which broke a years-long moratorium with a positive execution binge in 2015, hanged eight men on May 28 in various jails around the country.

The most noteworthy were three ethnic Balochs, Shawsawar Baloch, Sabir Rind, and Shabbir Rind.

The three Baloch Student Organization insurgents/terrorists had in 1998 commandeered a Pakistan International Airline flight bound for Karachi, Arghanistan, trying to draw attention to their native Balochistan‘s poverty and to protest the nuclear tests Pakistan was about to conduct there.

The plane’s pilot fooled the hijackers into believing he had met their demand to fly to India — but instead touched down in Hyderabad where Pakistani troops stormed the plane and arrested the men without any casualties.

The nuclear tests went off as planned, on May 28, 1998: seventeen years to the day before the Baloch revolutionaries’ hangings.


Pakistan plane hijackers hanged by dawn-news

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia has long been prolific in its use of capital punishment, but recent years have seen its signature swordsmen so busy that the kingdom has advertised to hire more.

Last May 28, Saudi Arabia carried out its 90th execution of 2015, a figure surpassing the sum for all of 2014, which was in its turn up from previous years — a trend that the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, and Arbitrary Executions called “very disturbing.”

(Note, however, that Saudi executions have often tended to proceed with spurts and lulls.)

The man on the end of the sword was Ihsan Amin, a heroin smuggler and Pakistani national: around half of the humans Saudi Arabia beheaded during this execution surge were foreigners, including ten Pakistanis.

Part of the Themed Set: The 2010s.

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