Category Archives: Saudi Arabia

2009: Two thieves in Riyadh

Posted on by

Two men were beheaded in Riyadh on this date in 2009 for bizarrely causing a man’s death in an unarmed purse-snatching.

An Interior Ministry statement says Faisal bin Fahd and Bandar bin Abdullah first stole the Chinese man’s laptop bag while he was walking. When the man tried to catch up with them, he fell and died after hitting his head on the pavement.

On this day..

2009: A day in the death penalty around the world

Posted on by

Capiital punishment may be an ancient historical phenomenon, but it’s hardly ancient history.

The executions that several of the 21st century world’s more aggressive death penalty users coincidentally carried out a year ago today testify together to the enduring place (and variegated guises) of the headsman in modernity.

China

Three prisoners were reported killed in Jinan in China on Jan. 15, 2009.

Two were men who had been serving prison terms for separate crimes when they incurred a death sentence for a violent (though seemingly non-lethal) escape attempt.

Liu Junjie, 35, and Wang Bing, 31, broke out of the prison in Zibo City on December 8, 2007 as a truck was moving out of the prison gate, according to a statement from the Shandong Provincial High People’s Court.

They hit a prison worker and two policemen with iron bars and choppers as they forced their way out. They were later caught as they fled along a road.

Former cabbie Bo Lijun shared that fate for a series of thefts, rapes, and murders.

According to the court, Bo raped and suffocated a female barber on Oct. 23, 2002 in Dongying.

Bo attempted to rape a female passenger in a wooded area near Dongying on July 29, 2006. Although he abandoned the rape attempt, he clubbed her to death for fear she would inform the police, and he buried the body at the site.

Saudi Arabia

One Mushabeb Al-Ahmari was beheaded in the province of Asir for “killing a compatriot with a machine gun” (who he killed and why was not reported).

Al-Ahmari was a minor when he was sentenced. The statement said his execution was delayed until he came of age.

United States

62-year-old James Callahan suffered lethal injection in Alabama Jan. 15, 2009, after 26 years on death row for raping and murdering a Jacksonville State University student in 1982. Callahan

requested a last meal of two corn dogs, french fries and a Coke … spent the day visiting with family and spiritual supporters … receive[d] communion at 4:30 p.m.

Callahan’s will bequeaths to his son $36.42 from his prison account, a black and white Radio Shack TV, two watches, a Walkman, some headphones, a leather belt, two pairs of boots, one pair of Nike tennis shoes, food items and legal papers.

Updated: Somalia

(This incident was not brought to our attention until after the post was already up, but in the peripatetic spirit of the entry, we thought it suitable to append.)

Somali politician Abdirahman Ahmed (also known as Waldiire) was shot by an Islamist militia in the port of Kismayo on Jan. 15, 2009.

Perhaps the first pol executed by Islamists, Ahmed was once the spokesman for a faction in the Somali civil war. He was put to death for collaborating with the Ethiopians who invaded Somalia at U.S. behest. As the Ethiopians were Christian, this behavior qualified as “apostasy” to the militants’ sharia court.

In January 2009, Ethiopia was in the process of withdrawing its military presence in its war-torn neighbor.

On this day..

1818: Abdullah ibn Saud, last ruler of the first Saudi state

Posted on by

On this date in 1818, the last ruler of the first state established by the Al Saud who rule the modern state of Saudi Arabia lost his head to the Ottoman Sultan.

The Ottoman state and its (largely independent) vassal Egypt begged to dispute the Wahhabi tribe’s authority in the Arabian peninsula (and its proclivity for raiding Ottoman caravans) and made war on the House of Saud throughout the 1810’s.

The Battle of ad-Dir’iyah in 1818 settled the matter, with our day’s principal Abdullah I surrendering to the Egyptian general Ibrahim Pasha.

We pick up the action from the third-hand, well-after-the-fact reports of the London Times. This, printed on Jan. 16 1819 under the “German Papers” heading:

FROM THE TURKISH FRONTIERS, DEC. 16.

The last victory over the Wechabites puts an end to the war at once. Ibrahim Pacha, who commanded the Turkish army, sends the captive Abdallah to Constantinople, but he first had his head shaved, and all his teeth pulled out.

On Feb. 6, the Times channeled the Dutch and Flanders mail:

Intelligence from Constantinople, dated the 24th December, states, that the Chief of the Wechabites, Abdallah, and his Iman, were brought prisoners into that capital on the 16th of the same month. After being led, in chains, through the principal streets, they were taken to prison and put to the torture. On the following morning, they were brought before the Sultan and beheaded. Their naked bodies were exposed during three days, and then delivered to the populace.

In addition to Abdullah himself, this affair finished off the city of Diriyah as a Saudi capital.

But of course, the Saud and their state were just getting started.

On this day..

1977: Princess Misha’al bint Fahd al Saud and her lover

Posted on by

On this date in 1977, a 19-year-old royal adulteress and her paramour were executed in a Jeddah parking lot by the order of the girl’s powerful grandfather.

Princess Misha’al‘s fate has been obscured by secrecy and the Rashomon-like interpretations imposed upon it by observers.

In its outline (and the first stock interpretation we’re imposing) it’s that timeless human tragedy, the love story, in which headstrong royal daughter and suffocating traditional family square off over the seditious power of the feminine libido.

The princess, in a youthful arranged marriage by most accounts, took up with a Saudi boy while both were studying abroad in cosmopolitan Beirut, and dangerously attempted to maintain the affair back in the royal kingdom to the point of a quixotic (and obviously foiled) escape attempt. Whether under color of a judicial proceeding — the story says Misha’al refused to walk away by simply renouncing her lover and defiantly brought down the death sentence by confessing adultery — or simply on his own authority, the girl’s staunchly conservative* grandfather exercised his right as tribal patriarch to inflict an honor killing for the disgrace they had brought on the family.

The execution in Jeddah — she by gunshot,** he by a very clumsy beheading — that is supposed to have occurred on this date was public, but quiet; news of it got abroad only slowly and incompletely. Small wonder that, once it did, the blended motifs of Romeo and Juliet, harem titillation and oil politics made dynamite material for high-, middle- or lowbrow exploitation.

In 1980, the affair became the subject of one of the most notorious television programs ever aired, the docudrama Death of a Princess. This film’s airing in Britain in 1980 led Riyadh to expel the British ambassador, and cost £200 million of lost revenue for the UK from canceled orders and product boycotts by the Saudis.†

It was aired on in the United States on PBS in 1980 to similar controversy, as oil companies rushed to distance themselves from it.

Rebroadcast in 2005, Death of a Princess is available online for your judgment (as is this partial script): is this a muckraking expose of a shameful crime? orientalist heavy petting? “a sensitive and thoughtful exploration of the Arab dilemma,” as per its own advance publicity? and what did the official apologies (and in only a few countries, censorship) say about the political weight of the petroleum industry?

These, meanwhile, are the western reactions, already removed from events by a further layer of mediation, a forest of axes seeking grinding. If the writer who composed this piece is to be believed, the executed girl has posthumously achieved a sort of universal symbolic gravity in the Arab world, standing for the plight of any hopeless cause of justice dashed against authoritarian power.

* For the House of Saud, it must be recalled, the personal was political in the problematic confrontation between tradition and modernity athwart the desert kingdom’s sea of oil.

** “Princess Misha’al” was executed fully veiled, which permits the rumor that the slain woman was actually a surrogate and the onetime royal favorite lives on incognito somewhere.

† According to the July 4, 1980 London Times.

Part of the Themed Set: The Feminine Mystique.

Editor’s note: References to “Princess Misha” corrected; thanks to hannah for the clarification.

On this day..

1980: Islamic extremists for the Grand Mosque seizure

Posted on by

At dawn this date in 1980, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia publicly beheaded over 60 Islamic extremists who had seized Mecca’s holy Al-Masjid al-Haram the preceding November — one of the formative and strangely forgotten events in the birth of radical Islam.

Saudi Arabia’s uneven but unmistakable modernization generated friction extending to the royal family itself.

On November 20, 1979, with 100,000-plus pilgrims bustling in Islam’s holiest shrine on the hajj, a few hundred multinational messianic militants took it over with a cache of smuggled firearms.

For two embarrassing weeks, the Saudi government struggled to respond, bumbling a couple of military operations and delicately negotiating the ecclesiastical permission it would require to commit violence within the Grand Mosque. (Strict Moslim prohibitions against same had left the kingdom’s unarmed guards essentially defenseless against the initial takeover.)

In exchange for that fatwa, the House of Saud struck a Faustian bargain: agreeing to roll back secularization and impose strict Islamic law.

The balance of military materiel, of course, would prove to be no contest at all; Riyadh had troops, heavy armament, and now, permission to use them (and to damage the mosque … which they did). Most of the Mahdists were slain in the decisive assault; the survivors* (except for a few who were underage) were publicly beheaded in various cities around Saudi Arabia on this date, including the operation’s leader, Juhayman al-Otaibi.

But their deed — second-tier news at the time in a United States distracted by the Iranian Revolution — would have dramatic long-term repurcussions. Though intimations of deeper bin Laden family involvement** seem sketchy, it certainly appears to have inspired the 22-year-old Osama bin Laden; he soon made his way to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, a war that began in earnest just days after the end of the siege and to whose prosecution Saudi Arabia and the west would gratefully direct Islamist energies.

Meanwhile, the Saudi government’s pact with the clergy that gained it permission to assail the Grand Mosque saw it subsequently bankroll Wahhabi religious instruction in Saudi Arabia and beyond … arguably the hand that rocked the cradle of present-day Islamic radical movements like al-Qaeda.

Much of what is latterly recalled about this affair by Anglophones comes courtesy of journalist Yaroslav Trofimov’s recent book The Siege of Mecca: The 1979 Uprising at Islam’s Holiest Shrine. (Review | Another | Book home page).

In this clip, the author discusses the legacy of the siege with Fareed Zakaria.

* The Saudi government put out the figure of 63 executions. Some sources now report 67.

On this day..

1975: Prince Faisal ibn Musa’id, royal assassin

Posted on by

On this date in 1975, a Saudi prince knelt in the public square before Riyadh’s Great Mosque, and 10,000 onlookers watched a golden-hilted sword took off his head for regicide.

It is little enough to say that, twelve weeks before, Faisal ibn Musa’id (transliterated several different ways — ibn or bin; Musa’id, Musaid, Musaed, or Musad) had approached his uncle King Faisal and shot him three times at point-blank range.

The reason(s) why a prince of the realm should do such an extraordinary thing are the real issue. They were murky then, and remain so to this day.

Certainly, when the monarch of the world’s leading oil producer is slain shortly after denying his product to the world’s leading oil consumer … well, speculation is bound to happen, even if the oil embargo was wrapped up a year before the murder. The assassin had studied (lackadaisically) in the United States a few years before, fueling hypotheses of a CIA hit, but there’s not even much of a satisfying just-so story to go with that, to say nothing of supporting evidence.

Whatever reasons there were seem to have been internal — a personal vendetta arising ultimately from the kingdom’s uneven confrontation with modernity so sensitively treated in Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt novels.*

The prince’s brother Khalid (or Khaled) had been slain by Saudi Arabia’s security forces in 1965 after demonstrating against television’s entry into the kingdom, an innovation authorized by King Faisal to the chagrin of strict Wahhabists. Khalid remains a martyr figure to Islamic fundamentalists to this day, and the conventional supposition is that Prince Faisal shot King Faisal in vengeance served 10 years cold; some accounts have him announcing as much at the moment of the murder.

(The conspiratorial palace intrigue version suspects Prince Fahd (or Faud) of using the aggrieved young man as his instrument in a coup; a defector from the Saudi diplomatic corps also inculpated Fahd along these lines. King Faisal’s death made Fahd the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia upon the accession of a politically disinterested brother; Fahd ascended the throne officially when that brother died in 1982 — the succession was passing brother-to-brother, rather than father-to-son — and had steered the ship of state for 30 years by the time of his own death in 2005.)

The official inquiry concluded, as such things do, that Faisal killed Faisal alone, and though early reports had the shooter mentally unbalanced, authorities eventually figured him sane enough for trial and the full measure of the law’s majesty.

Faisal ibn Musa’id remains the only royal prince judicially executed by the House of Saud.

* An assassination inspired by Faisal’s shows up in the second novel of the cycle, Trench.

On this day..

2002: ‘Ali bin Hittan bin Sa’id, Muhammad bin Suleyman bin Muhammad, and Muhammad bin Khalil bin ‘Abdullah

Posted on by

On this date in 2002, three homosexual men were beheaded with a sword in the resort city of Abha, Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi Interior Ministry announced that the men had “committed acts of sodomy, married each other, seduced young men and attacked those who rebuked them” — suggesting, despite the allusion to molestation, that homosexuality might have been the primary basis for their execution.

The incident created a ripple of worldwide attention and some pungent speculation, but the particulars remain shadowy — not unlike the ambiguous position of gays in Saudi Arabia even in the face of draconian sodomy laws.

On this day..