ExecutedToday.com

Last year on this date, a Central African Republic presidential guard summarily executed a man in a hospital to satisfy a lynch mob pursuing him for murdering his wife.

Amoudou Samassa was supposed to have stabbed his estranged wife to death, provoking an armed mob intent on dispensing street justice. After gendarmes pried him away unkilled, the incensed crowd jammed the streets of the capital Bangui.

Reuters reported that when negotiations to disperse them proved fruitless,

one guard officer, Lt. Jean-Claude Ngaikoisset, finally told the crowd: “If the death of this criminal is the only thing you’re asking for to clear these avenues, then I see no objection”.

File it under “Creative solutions to gridlock.”

Central African Republic security forces.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hdptcar/ / CC BY 2.0

Also On This Date

• 1780: David Dawson and Ralph Morden, Quaker "traitors"
• Feast Day of St. Catherine of the Wheel

This date annually is the feast of iconic — perhaps mythological — Christian martyr Saint Catherine, said to have been put to death in the 4th century for her faith.

St. Catherine in a 700-year-old stained glass at St. Mary’s Church of Deerhurst. Image courtesy of the Sacred Destinations Travel Guide.

One of the most popular Catholic saints, St. Catherine was reputed to have been a beautiful young maiden of Alexandria — so wise as to convert every pagan scholar sent to dispute her, so devoted as to be mystically betrothed to Christ.

Catherine was condemned by one of the last pagan rulers of Rome to torture on a breaking wheel, which shattered when it touched her — so she was simply beheaded.

Despite this inauspicious debut, the breaking wheel was Catherine’s iconic attribute, by which her frequent appearances in devotional art can be recognized.

This gruesome instrument of torture was also known as the “Catherine wheel” in medieval Europe, from which English derives the deceptively winsome-sounding name of a firework.

The saint became the patron of those condemned to this horrific death as well as a diverse swath of the wider society: wheelwrights, mechanics, and other laborers who worked with wheels for apparent reasons; teachers, philosophers and scribes for her learning; girls, virgins and young maids for her purity. Single women seeking husbands still offer her supplication:

St. Catherine, St. Catherine, O lend me thine aid
And grant that I never may die an old maid.
A husband, St. Catherine.
A handsome one, St. Catherine.
A rich one, St. Catherine.
A nice one, St. Catherine.
And soon, St. Catherine.

Catholic recountings of the saint’s legend can be read here and here. More St. Catherine’s Day customs are enumerated here.

Also On This Date

• 2008: Amoudou Samassa, to quell a lynch mob
• 1780: David Dawson and Ralph Morden, Quaker "traitors"