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.

On this day..

• 2004: Three for honor-killing a 6-year-old
• 1729: Philippe Nivet, "Fanfaron"
• 1431: Beaumont and Vivonne
• 1509: Four Dominicans for the Jetzer affair
• 1915: Kassim Ismail Mansoor, purveyor of coffee and treason
• 2000: Robert Earl Carter, exonerating Anthony Graves
• 1793: Ezra Mead, "in one of these fits of insanity"
• 1928: Frederick Browne and Pat Kennedy, hanged by a microscope
• 1841: Marius Darmes, frustrated regicide
• 1622: Not quite Squanto (Tisquantum), Pilgrim befriender
• 1076: Waltheof II, Earl of Northumbria
• 1718: John "Jack Ketch" Price, former hangman