Category Archives: How

Methods of execution

1978: Salim Rubai Ali, President of South Yemen

Posted on by

On this date in 1978, the South Yemen president Salim Rubai Ali was executed after an attempted self-coup.

The very first president of the short-lived (1967-1990) polity, Salim had been an anti-colonial fighter in the National Liberation Front but had his reservations about his coalition partner’s tilt towards the Soviet model and figured he wouldn’t mind being solely in charge.

He attempted in June 1978 to seize power against other top coalition officials; Ali Nasir Muhammad, who is still an important political figure in unified Yemen to this day, overthrew the short-lived putsch and executed the former boss.

On this day..

1999: Eduardo Agbayani, omnishambles execution

Posted on by

At three in the afternoon this date in 1999, Eduardo Agbayani was put to death by lethal injection in the Philippines.

At that very same moment, President Joseph Estrada — an erratic populist who months ago had presided over the first execution since the Marcos dictatorship — was furiously, unsuccessfully, trying to dial the prison to halt the execution.

Initially intent on the condign punishment of a man who raped his own daughter, Estrada had his mind bent towards mercy by a silver-tongued Catholic bishop. With the lethal drugs imminent, he set about on his mission of grace only to find that the nation’s sovereign placing a life-and-death call runs into the same banal connectivity fails that you and I have trying to ring the motor vehicles department. The Economist described it thus:

According to the bishop, Mr Estrada later said he tried several times to telephone the prison, where the execution procedure had already begun, but he got an engaged or fax tone. Mr Estrada was not in the part of the presidential palace with the telephone linked by direct line to the prison — installed for the very purpose of calling off an execution at the last minute. As the seconds slipped by, an aide was dispatched to call on the direct line.

What happened next is unclear. Witnesses to the execution said that there was knocking on the door of the execution chamber and a voice could be heard, saying, “Hold! Hold!” The aide’s cries, according to an official, were at first thought to be a prank. The president’s spokesman later said that the aide’s call had got through at 12 minutes past three. Mr Agbayani had been pronounced dead a minute earlier.

On this day..

1567: Captain William Blackadder, Darnley patsy

Posted on by

On this date in 1567, the Scottish soldier Captain William Blackadder (or “Blacketer”) died a scapegoat at Edinburgh.

Being dragged on a hurdle to Mercat Cross where he was hanged and quartered, and his remains nailed up in Scotland’s principal cities, was undoubtedly the worst thing that ever happened to Captain Blackadder but posterity finds his severed tendons and ruined viscera only a lesser subplot in the psychodrama of that august future Executed Today fixture Mary, Queen of Scots.

Mary’s famously terrible marriage to the monstrous Lord Darnley produced the eventual King James VI and I, at the cost of utterly ruining Mary’s reign. Please reference the great many more learned and erudite sources that will dwell on the innumerable faults of this grasping English lord who immediately upon achieving wedlock began maneuvering against his wife for power in Scotland. He’s notorious as a drunk, a lech, a murderer, and in general an obnoxious and arrogant shit.

Until, 18 months and change into the marriage, a huge explosion rocked Kirk o’ Field, Edinburgh … and when the debris cleared, there lay the bodies of the obnoxious consort and his servant. Strangely they were dead in a nearby orchard, suspiciously unsinged by the Gunpowder Plot-like pyrotechnics.


Drawing of the crime scene made for the English Secretary of State William Cecil

The particulars of Darnley’s murder have puzzled posterity for the ensuing 450 years, precipitating as it did Mary’s own fall from her throne — a moment manifested by Mary’s humiliating surrender when her dwindling and dispirited supporters melted away instead of fighting at the “Battle” of Carberry Hill. Mary had the humiliation in that June of 1567 of being led through Edinburgh by rebel lords to imprisonment, under the jeers of a hostile crowd.

But since these rebels were rising against Mary’s post-Darnley fling, putatively in the name of Mary herself, they also proceeded to conduct a disingenuous search for Darnley’s assassins in these days, landing on this luckless son of a declining house who had presented himself under Mary’s colors at Carberry Hill. Nobody since and probably nobody then really thought he had “art and part” in Darnley’s death; nevertheless, the diarist Birrel noted, “the 24 day of Junij Captane Villiam Blacketer was drawn backward, in ane cairte, from ie Tolbuith to the Crosse, and ther wes hangit and quartred, for being on the King’s Murther.”

We could not in good conscience miss the opportunity afforded by this distinctive name to cite topical-to-us content from the BBC sitcom Blackadder.

On this day..

1915: Carl Frederick Muller, fluent in languages but not in espionage

Posted on by

57 year old Carl Frederick Muller was a fluent linguist, able to speak English, Russian, German, Dutch and Flemish. In October of 1914 he was living in Antwerp in Holland and had German soldiers billeted in his house. He was recruited into the German Secret Service in late 1914.

-From the June 23, 2019 Facebook post of the Capital Punishment UK Facebook page. Click through to find out how Muller’s abortive attempt to put his gifts to use for spycraft saw him standing in front of a British firing squad by June 23, 1915. He was the second of 11 German spies to meet that fate during the Great War.

On this day..

1568: Weyn Ockers, slipper slinger

Posted on by

On this date in 1568 the Dutch Protestant Weyn Ockers was drowned with her maid Trijn Hendricks.

Both were condemned for having taken part in the paroxysm of Calvinist anti-icon riots known as the Beeldenstorm (“icon-fury”) — specifically the 1566 sack of the then-Catholic Oude Kerk in Amsterdam. The Netherlands’ Spanish Catholic overlords were in these months of 1568 busily meting out revenge for the sacrilege.

In a somewhat iconic event of the iconoclasm, Ockers was alleged to have chucked her slipper* at an image of the Virgin Mary perched on the altar — one particularly resented by the reform-minded since the priest encouraged lucrative offerings of parishioners’ valuables to be presented to this icon. One might well doubt the fact of it; Ockers had not been arrested for this offense, but the accusation emerged from the interrogation under torture of other Protestants. Ockers copped to it under torture herself; Hendricks, made of tougher stuff, withstood torture twice and never admitted anything, but still shared her mistress’s fate.

* Not the worst missile that Marian statuary has endured.

On this day..

1839: Domingo Cullen, Santa Fe governor

Posted on by

Domingo Cullen, the governor of the Argentine province of Santa Fe, was extrajudicially executed on this date in 1839.

Cullen (English Wikipedia entry | Spanish) succumbed to Argentina’s lethal rolling civil conflict between political Unitarians (strong central state) and Federales (distributed federal power).

The reader will be unsurprised to find a provincial governor to be an exponent of federalism, and this put him at loggerheads with the ferocious Buenos Aires dictator General Juan Manuel de Rosas.

He logged a more specific head about a year before his death by attempting to negotiate a province-level arrangement with the French fleet blockading Argentina,* for which extravagance of federalism Rosas forced him to vacate his office and conceal himself in internal exile. Eventually Cullen was betrayed, and his arrestors putatively escorting him to the capital for trial rudely informed him once they reached the soil of Buenos Aires province that they were in fact licensed to shoot him out of hand.

Cullen’s son, Patricio, served as Santa Fe governor from 1862 to 1865, and also met a violent death.

* In response to a law that permitted the Argentine armed forces to conscript foreign nationals, including Frenchmen.

On this day..

1483: Fernando II, Duke of Braganza

Posted on by

Fernando II, Duke of Braganza, was beheaded as a traitor on this date in 1483.

This lord (English Wikipedia entry | Portuguese) represented perhaps the mightiest noble house in Portugal. Fernando’s grandfather, Duke Afonso I, had made himself the power behind the throne of the young King Afonso V; Fernando’s father, Duke Fernando I, had sat as regent in Portugal while the king went off to war in Morocco.

Fernando II likewise luxuriated in the honors of royal proximity … while Afonso V kept the throne.

In the early 1480s, the ailing Afonso abdicated in favor of his son. The young King John II was an aspiring absolutist who keenly grasped the danger posed to him by overmighty aristocrats, and systematically set about reducing their privileges.

As Portugal’s largest landholder, nobody had more to lose from this project than Braganza, and he boldly appealed in secret correspondence to Queen Isabella* of neighboring Castile — a realm against which the Portuguese state, and Fernando personally, had been at war just a couple of years before.

As one will suppose from Fernando’s presence on this here blog, John caught wind of the conspiring.

This bad behavior got the Braganzas proscribed, briefly, but the house was soon restored to its station and has written an illustrious history. Indeed, the Braganzas came to the Portuguese throne in 1640 and their Bragantine lasted as long as the institution of monarchy did in that country. There’s still a Duke of Braganza to this day.

* Of Christopher Columbus-sponsoring, Isabella-and-Ferdinand fame.

On this day..

2013: The Hawalli monster

Posted on by

On this date in 2013, Egyptian Hajjaj Saadi was hanged with countryman Ahmad Abdulsalam al-Baili at a car park in Kuwait.

Photographers were on hand to record the public execution, just the second in Kuwait since breaking a six-year moratorium on hangings. Saadi in particular was a reviled criminal, dubbed the “Hawalli monster” for the expat district of Kuwait City where he lived — and where, his prosecutors alleged, Saadi lured some 17 or 18 young children, both boy and girls, to rape.

Saadi strenuously denied the charges at trial, insisting that his confession was extracted by torture. No doubt it was. He also said he got no aid from the Egyptian embassy.

Ahmad Abdulsalam al-Baili murdered an Asian couple by torching their flat, and unsuccessfully tried to do the same to an Egyptian couple.

Caution: Mature content. The video in particular shows the actual hanging moment itself; it’s evident that Saadi, a muscular bodybuilder, survived the drop, and in the video he struggles against the rope.


Ahmad Abdulsalam al-Baili


Hajjaj Saadi

On this day..

1771: Daskalogiannis

Posted on by

The Crete patriot Ioannis Vlachos — better known as Daskalogiannis — lost his skin to the Turks on this date in 1771.

Statue of the D-man at Anopolis, Crete. (cc) image by AWI.

A wealthy shipping magnate, Daskalogiannis led the Cretan arm of the nationalist Orlov Revolt, which also featured on the Peloponnese. This affair is named not for any Greek but for the Russian admiral Alexei Orlov, who brought his fleet into the Mediterranean to engage the Turks during the 1768-1774 Russo-Turkish War, inspiring the Greek rising in the process.

Unfortunately for the rebels, some initial successes failed to catalyze a national revolution and Russian aid for the breakaway regions came up considerably short of what was pledged. While Orlov’s navy still harried Constantinople, Daskalogiannis for several months maintained a sort of autonomous redoubt from the mountain fastnesses around Sfakia with about 1,300 followers. By early 1771, he was forced to surrender himself at a gorgeous old Venetian fortress, then was taken to Heraklion and a horrific execution by flaying alive.

He’s commemorated in many street names in Crete, the name of the Chania International Airport, and a number of poems and folk ballads.

On this day..

1492: Jan van Coppenolle

Posted on by

On this date in 1492 the Flemish rebel Jan van Coppenolle was beheaded at the Vrijdagmarkt in Ghent.

When the formerly doughty duchy of Burgundy faltered as an independent polity after the death of Charles the Bold in 1477, Ghent and its sister Low Countries trading cities had forced upon Charles’s heir Mary an expansive recognition of those cities’ rights.

It was known as the Great Privilege, and it was greatly dependent on the political weakness of the recognizing authority.

Mary expressed this weakness in another way as well: with her marriage to the Habsburg heir Maximilian I of Austria — tying her patrimony to the Austrian empire. Upon this marriage did the House of Habsburg found a redoubling of its already expansive holdings, for Mary herself brought the wealthy Low Countries into the fold while the couple’s son Philip married a Spanish infanta and founded the line of Habsburg Spanish monarchs.* Apt indeed was the House Habsburg motto: “Leave the waging of wars to others! But you, happy Austria, marry; for the realms which Mars awards to others, Venus transfers to you”

Mary, unfortunately, was not around to enjoy the triumph of her matrimonial arrangements, for in early 1482 a horse threw her while out on a ride, breaking her back. Philip might have had a bright future ahead, but he was only four years old.

It was Maximilian’s flex on direct power in the Low Countries — and in particular his ambition to raise taxes to fund expansionist wars — that brought to the stage our man van Coppenolle (German Wikipedia entry | Dutch). He became a preeminent popular leader of a decade-long Flemish rebellion against the future Holy Roman Emperor that verged towards a war of independence.

Briefly forced to flee to exile in France after Maximilian quelled the initial resistance in 1485, van Coppenolle returned with French backing and controlled Ghent from 1487 when the rebellion re-emerged. This second installment had some legs, especially since Maximilian was imprisoned several months by the city of Bruges, allowing van Coppenolle leave enough to even mint his own coinage, the Coppenollen … before the Habsburgs finally suppressed the risings.

* The present Spanish king, Felipe VI, is a descendant of Philip I.

On this day..