2019: Nine for assassinating Hisham Barakat

Last year on this date, nine men purportedly involved in the 2015 car bomb assassination of Egyptian prosecutor general Hisham Barakat were hanged at a Cairo prison.

Barakat had prosecuted thousands of Muslim Brotherhood members and supporters of the elected Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, who was deposed in a military coup in 2013.

“A monument to unfair trials in Egypt” in the words of Amnesty International, this case compassed 28 total death sentences,* supported by the exercises of Egypt’s feared torturers. “Give me an electric probe and I’ll make anyone confess to assassinating [the late President Anwar] Sadat,” was the videotaped courtroom quip of Mahmoud al-Ahmadi, who was one of those noosed on February 20, 2019. “We have been electrocuted so much we could power Egypt for 20 years.” Other defendants described being hung upside-down, menaced with knives, forced into stress positions, and coerced via threats to their family members.

Not particularly aggressive with (judicial) executions prior to the Arab Spring that brought Morsi to power, Egypt under his deposer/successor Sisi has warmed up its gallows and now perennially ranks among the most execution-happy jurisdictions in the world. As of this writing we’re still awaiting Amnesty International’s annual review of global death penalty trends, but in 2018 that organization “credited” Egypt with 717 death sentences and 43 executions. Those figures respectively were second in the world (behind China) and sixth in the world (behind China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, and Iraq).

* According to Amnesty International, 13 of the 28 convictions were in absentia (although at least one of these 13 has since been repatriated to Egypt). Of the 15 whom Egypt convicted in the flesh, six had their sentences reduced on appeal.

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2013: Abdullah Fandi Al-Shammary, long time coming

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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2014: Li Hao

On this date in 2014, China executed a man named Li Hao “for keeping six women in a dungeon as sex slaves and killing two of them,” per CNN’s gloss on Xinhua reports.

A Luoyang government clerk, this Gary Heidnik-like monster turned his basement into a cramped prison where he held six women lured into his clutches from nightclubs and karaoke bars. All were subjected to rape and forced prostitution; two he eventually forced their fellow-inmates to murder.* His spree ended only when one of his captives managed to escape and take the report to police — whose failure to have detected the predator earlier became a public scandal.

“The victims ranged from about 16 to 23 in age, and one who was 20 at the time of kidnap became pregnant,” according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Their lengths of captivity in Li Hao’s personal hell ranged from two months to nearly two years.

* Three of the women Li kidnapped were also convicted of murder. In view of their coercion, they received light sentences (three years for one of them; probation for two others). While this is certainly preferable to execution, there was also understandable protest about victims in such a desperate and traumatic circumstance being prosecuted at all.

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2016: Daniel Shaver, police impunity victim

America’s crisis of police violence has produced innumerable horrific snuff films. One of the worst is the January 18, 2016 bodycam footage of Mesa, Arizona cop Philip Brailsford executing Daniel Shaver in the hallway of a La Quinta Inn.

In this nauseating five-minute video we see — classic horror film technique — right down the gunbarrel as Sgt. Charles Langley screams at Shaver and a companion, Monique Portillo. Langley and his partner, Brailsford, are responding to a report of a gun: it’s Shaver’s air rifle, which he uses in the pest control work that has brought him to Mesa on business.

After making both parties surrender themselves, Langley and Brailsford disdain such obvious techniques as “move in and frisk them,” instead choosing to subject their prey to a bizarre impromptu game of Simon Says, repeatedly threatening — one might almost say, relishing the anticipation of — the summary death that they’ll soon deliver.

They’re armed not only with AR-15s and an excess of machismo but with the legal doctrine of “Qualified Immunity”, which protects state officials (including but not only law enforcement) from personal liability when they undertake official acts. Such immunity is supposedly contingent on the act falling somewhere within hailing distance of reasonable. In practice, courts always find that qualified immunity applies in excessive-force situations, especially under the infinitely elastic standard of “officer safety” that permits the most specious and absurd claim of police fear to excuse any degree of force in response: “qualified” immunity is really more like “an absolute shield.”

Brailsford and Langley have been trained on this doctrine, just as they’ve been trained for the kind of situation they’re in. Not so Shaver: the traveling exterminator is going to get one chance, and it’s somehow Shaver’s responsibility to manage the situation to the satisfaction of his prospective murderers. (Shaver is also somewhat drunk here.)

When the terrified man is ordered to push himself from a prone position up to his knees, his legs come uncrossed, violating the previous arbitrary instruction that Langley has given him and causing the armed yahoos to straight-up lose their shit.

A panicking Shaver attempts to placate them by putting his hands behind his back — submissively, he thinks, but of course the voices behind the gunsights here pretend to think he might be going for a weapon and again threaten him with execution. “You do that again, we’re shooting you!” Langley barks. (God, please do it again.) Now sobbing and pleading for his life with two guys who don’t like him and can freely merc him, Shaver attempts to comply with their gratuitously humiliating demand that he crawl towards them, when he’s suddenly wasted by Brailsford. The apparent “provocation” is Shaver’s reaching at his pants to prevent them coming down as he scuffles his knees over the cheap hotel carpet. Officer safety! What if he’d had a gun taped in there like Bruce Willis in Die Hard?

A jury that viewed this very video acquitted Brailsford of second-degree murder (and of the lesser included charge of manslaughter), so now it’s legal precedent that cops can just do this to you. His department quietly re-hired him so that it could pension him off at $2,500 per month for life.

Recommended: on Scott Horton’s radio show, former policeman Raeford Davis discusses the scene and the changes needed in law enforcement to make it a thing of the past.

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2011: Yaqub Ali, stabber

An Iranian criminal named Yaqub (or Yaghoob) Ali was publicly hanged on this date in 2011, at Kaj Square in Tehran’s tony Sa’adat Abad neighborhood.

Not ten weeks earlier, he had in those same environs perpetrated a grisly public stabbing of his ex’s new boyfriend. The crime outraged Iranians the nation with the wildfire online and TV promulgation of video showing the mauled victim, one Mohammad Reza, helplessly bleeding to death on the street in broad daylight, unaided by any passerby — including two policemen who had witnessed the men’s altercation without intervening.

“The entire country was under shock after the incident,” according to a Tehran journalist. “No-one understands how the wounded man could have been left without assistance for so long. There is a general feeling that the incident is symptomatic of the growing insecurity in the country, especially in Tehran.”

The embedded video and the photo of the execution further down this post are very much Mature Content.

The speedy public hanging accordingly attracted a throng of angry onlookers.

According to an AFP wire story, “Separately, the ISNA news agency said that a convicted drug trafficker, identified only by his initials A.A., was executed in a prison in the town of Shirvan in northeast Iran. No other details were given.”

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2016: Nimr al-Nimr, Shiite cleric

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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2019: Wei Wei

Japan this morning hanged a Chinese man for a 2003 robbery-murder.

With two other Chinese nationals, Wei Wei robbed and murdered a clothier in Fukuoka Prefecture, along with his wife and two young daughters ages 11 and 8 — scoring ¥37,000 in the process. All four were strangled or drowned, and eventually discovered dumped in Hakata Bay, weighted down with dumbbells.

According to the Japan Times,

The two accomplices fled to China where they were arrested. One of them was executed there in 2005 and the other was given a life sentence.

Wei’s death sentence was finalized in 2011. Prior to the murder, the three had been involved in various robberies.

In a statement released on the same day, international human rights group Amnesty International’s Japanese arm lambasted the execution of Wei, noting that it went ahead while he was seeking a retrial.

“Appealing for a retrial is part of the processes stipulated in the criminal procedure law,” the group said.

“They should have begun a process for suspending the execution while he was demanding a retrial. Failing to do so runs counter to the international human rights law.”

Wei Wei is reportedly the first foreign national hanged in Japan since 2009

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2011: Amina bint Abdul Halim bin Salem Nasser

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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2010: Li Haito, reliquarian

From IANS on Friday, Nov. 19 of 2010. (via)

China executes official for plundering cultural relics

Beijing, Nov 19 (IANS) China Friday executed an official for stealing and selling cultural relics protected by the state, reports Xinhua.

Li Haitao was the chief of the cultural relics protection authority of the imperial garden in the Hebei provincial capital of Chengde.

He was executed after China’s Supreme People’s Court approved the death penalty on a conviction of embezzlement, the Intermediate People’s Court of Chengde said.

By taking advantage of his post between 1993 and 2002, Li had stolen 259 cultural relics stored in the depository of the Eight Outer Temples, an imperial compound built on the three-century old Summer Mountain Resort.


Putuo Zongcheng, one of the Eight Outer Temples. (cc) image from Ana Paula Hirama.

Li, 50, replaced the relics with copies, inferior or incomplete objects, and asked his subordinates to alter the records.

The stolen items included gold gilded Buddha statues, five of which were listed as state relics under first class protection, 56 were in the second grade and 58 in the third.

Li pocketed more than 3.2 million yuan ($482,240) after selling 152 stolen pieces.

Police have seized 202 relics and are still hunting for 57 other items.

Li’s four accomplices — Wang Xiaoguang, Yan Feng, Zhang Huazhang and Chen Fengwei — were given jail terms of up to seven years with fines.

His crimes went unnoticed until a Chinese expert found two royal cultural relics belonging to Beijing’s Palace Museum at an auction in Hong Kong in 2002.

The expert reported his discovery to the state cultural heritage authorities, which prompted a probe that found Chengde was the source of the relics.

Covering an area of 5.6 million sq metres, the Summer Mountain Resort was the temporary imperial palace of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) emperors Kangxi and Qianlong.

The mountain villa, the largest remaining classical imperial garden architecture in China, and the outlying temples were placed on the World Heritage list in 1994.

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2011: Muammar Gaddafi

Dictator Muammar Gaddafi (several alternate transliterations are familiar, such as Qaddafi and Gadhafi) was killed by his captors during the Libyan civil war on this date in 2011 — an act very much on the extrajudicial and summary side of the foggy borderlands defining an “execution”.

Libya’s despot since ejecting the British-supported King Idris way back in 1969, the wily colonel steered his state for 40-odd years; his blend of pan-Arabism, Islamic socialism, pan-Africanism, and direct democracy is known as the Third International Theory and expounded in Gaddafi’s own manual of political theory, The Green Book — which became required reading for generations of his subjects.

Eventually a figure of western vilification and a fixture in the United States’s enemy-of-the-month rotation, Gaddafi’s anti-imperialist credentials earned him respectful eulogies from Palestinians, black South Africans, and Latin American revolutionaries, all of whom he had at times aided. Whatever measure of genuine popular support he earned by measures like land distribution, Gaddafi did not hesitate to buttress with brutality. Internal regime opponents and dissident exiles alike had cause to fear him, and it’s not as if innocent bystanders could sleep easily either: a London constable was shot from the Libyan embassy during demonstrations in 1984, and only worldwide outcry prevented the execution of six foreign doctors who were scapegoated for an HIV outbreak in the early 2000s. Gaddafi’s government in 2008 paid $1.5 billion in compensation to settle a bundle of international terrorism incidents, including the 1986 West Berlin discotheque bombing and the 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Fitting that his own savage end might enter periodization historiography as the fin de siècle américain.

The ham-fisted NATO intervention into Libya’s Arab Spring-era civil war that brought about Gaddafi’s death might be the last that Washington will have undertaken in its purported “hyperpower” era, accountable to none but its own intentions; certainly it was (in the words of James Mann) “the apotheosis of the Obamian approach to the world.”

The aftermath did not flatter the Obamians: post-Gaddafi Libya speedily descended into failed-state status and has spent most of the 2010s cursed by still-continuing civil war, human rights horror, Islamic terrorism, and even open slave markets, with knock-on effects stoking the refugee crisis in Europe.*

The chief advocate of the intervention within the Obama administration, Samantha Power of Strangelovian nomen and Bosnian war dreams, recently published her memoir, The Education of an Idealist and issued the enraging auto-exoneration, “We could hardly expect to have a crystal ball when it came to accurately predicting outcomes in places where the culture was not our own.” Merely being alive for the aftermath of the Iraq omnishambles might have done her the job of scrying; Power’s boss, at least, learned the lesson well enough to shy from the reckless regime-change commitments demanded (including by Power herself) for the Syria conflict that might have brought not only similar catastrophe to its immediate “beneficiaries” but the prospect of nuclear confrontation with Russia. More warfare is surely on humanity’s horizon as the 2020s approach, but with great power competition rising alongside the seas, the prospect that it will be undertaken with such careless self-regard in such a large and consequential state seems remote.

Nor will future Libyas be so vulnerable as Libya, if they can help it. In the years prior, Gaddafi had ostentatiously surrendered his nuclear ambitions in exchange for aid and diplomatic normalization. Other observers like North Korea have justifiably concluded that states armed with nukes don’t get invaded while those armed with Foggy Bottom IOUs are just the next Melos in waiting. They’ll have the horrific viral videos of a bloodied and pleading Gaddafi being brutalized by his captors to remind them.

The dry narrative of his fate, from a UN investigation:

On 19 October 2011, Qadhafi’s son Mutassim decided they should leave Sirte because the thuwar had encircled and entered the city, trapping Muammar Qadhafi and his men in District 2. On the morning of 20 October they set off in a heavily armed convoy of approximately 50 vehicles. The convoy consisted of Muammar Qadhafi; his son Mutassim who was already wounded; Defence Minister Abubakr Younis … and approximately 200 armed men. There were also women and children in the convoy. Some of the armed men evacuated their wounded colleagues from the hospital and these unarmed men were placed in cars with their bandages still on; some still had tubes in their bodies.

The convoy headed east on the main road but ran into a rebel ambush. Numerous cars were badly damaged in the ambush and a number of people were injured. They circled to the sea road and headed west. The convoy split up. At this point a Toyota Corolla in front of Muammar Qadhafi’s green Landcruiser was hit by a NATO airstrike, probably by a Predator drone, and exploded. The explosion set off the airbags in Qadhafi’s car. Muammar Qadhafi and switched cars. The front of the convoy started taking fire from thuwar positions near the power plant and so Muammar Qadhafi, and others took refuge in a house as some of their bodyguards engaged in a fire fight with the rebel positions.

Moments after Muammar Qadhafi entered the house, an airstrike hit the vehicles, setting off secondary explosions. The strike and subsequent explosions left many wounded lying on the ground. At this point the thuwar began shelling the house where Muammar Qadhafi was hiding. Mutassim Qadhafi took approximately 20 fighters and left to look for vehicles. Muammar Qadhafi reportedly wanted to stay and fight but was persuaded to escape. The group belly-crawled to a sand berm. On the way an electrical transformer was struck and electrical wires fell on Qadhafi, striking his head, but he was saved by his blue flak jacket and a Kevlar helmet which was knocked off. The group reached the berm and ran behind it to the road where there were two drainage pipes. The group crawled through the pipes and took up a defensive position on the west side of the road where the pipes terminated.

Muammar Qadhafi crouched outside and between the two pipes. Abubakr Younis was in the right pipe and two fighters took up a position by a berm facing south and the other fighters faced north. The group was sheltered from the road and was unseen by the rebels … [until it] decided the group would make a stand and opened fire on a passing rebel vehicle. There was a fire fight. One of the guards threw a grenade. The grenade hit the top of the cement wall above the pipes and fell in front of Muammar Qadhafi. The guard tried to pick up the grenade but it exploded, killing him … Qadhafi was wounded in the blast by grenade shrapnel that hit and shredded his flak jacket. He sat on the floor dazed and in shock, bleeding from a wound in the left temple.

At that point, one of the party fashioned a white flag from his turban and waved in surrender to the thuwar from the 501st Brigade. The thuwar laid the men on their faces and bound their wrists. Muammar Qadhafi was immediately surrounded by thuwar and beaten. Muammar Qadhafi was heard to ask, “What is going on?” The survivors were placed into vehicles and taken away. [Mutassim Gaddafi and Abu-Bakr Yunis were also killed that same day by their captors. -ed.]

This is where the eyewitness evidence received by the Commission ends. Videos of the scene show Muammar Qadhafi being roughly handled by the thuwar, many screaming “We are Misrata” to identify where they are from. He is apparently stabbed with a bayonet in the buttocks. He is placed on the hood of a vehicle, bloody but alive, before being placed in an ambulance. He clearly has one head wound from the grenade shrapnel, but is otherwise not wounded. This is the last time Muammar Qadhafi is seen alive.

A televised interview of one of those who accompanied Muammar Qadhafi in the ambulance gave an account of what happened next. The young man, who states he is from Benghazi but was travelling with men from the Misrata thuwar when the Qadhafi convoy was attacked, claims he was the one that found Muammar Qadhafi and got into the back of the ambulance with him and two men from the Misrata thuwar. The ambulance started to drive to Misrata. The young man claims there was an argument between himself and the men from Misrata on what to do with Muammar Qadhafi, with him wanting to bring Qadhafi back to Bengazi. He claims he shot Qadhafi in the head and abdomen.

The Commission is unable to verify his claims. Video shows he was in the ambulance when Muammar Qadhafi was placed in it. What is clear is that Qadhafi was alive when he was taken into custody and placed in an ambulance in Sirte by members of the Misrata thuwar and was seemingly dead when the ambulance arrived in Misrata …

According to news reports, the official autopsy states Qadhafi was killed by a gunshot to the head. The Commission was not provided access to the autopsy report despite numerous requests to the NTC. Photos of Muammar Qadhafi’s body were provided to the Commission by members of the medical committee of Misrata who participated in the external examination of Qadhafi’s body … Analysis of the photos of the abdominal wounds by the Commission’s forensic pathologist determined they were penetrating wounds in the epigastric area, the nature of which was difficult to determine from photographs. Interviews with journalists who saw the body indicate Qadhafi was shot once in the head and twice in the abdomen.

* Just months ago as of this writing, the German sea captain Carola Rackete was arrested for breaking an Italian blockade to dock in Sicily with some 40 migrants: they’d been rescued off the coast of Libya.

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