Tag Archives: 2015

2015: Khaled al-Asaad, Palmyra archaeologist

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Syrian archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad was beheaded by the Islamic State on this date in 2015 for refusing them the ancient artifacts of his native Palmyra.

Eighty-two years old — Palmyra was still a French colony at the time of this birth — Al-Asaad was involved in excavations around that city throughout his adult life. He became the custodian of the archaeological site in 1963 and held the post for 40 years.

When the Salafist militant army rolled up on his oasis city that spring.* he helped to evacuate the town’s museum and Daesh put him to torture to extract the whereabouts of the priceless cultural treasures he’d concealed from them. He made himself a hero to Syrians and antiquarians alike by denying his captors any satisfaction save his death — which was accomplished by a public beheading.

At least one other scholar, Qassem Abdullah Yehya, the Deputy Director of DGAM Laboratories, was also killed by ISIS/ISIL for protecting the dig site.

after Khaled al-Asaad

bonepole bonepole since you died
there’s been dying everywhere
do you see it slivered where you are
between a crown and a tongue     the question still
more god or less     I am all tangled
in the smoke you left     the swampy herbs
the paper crows     horror leans in and brings
its own light     this life so often inadequately
lit     your skin peels away     your bones soften
your rich unbecoming     a kind of apology

when you were alive your cheekbones
dropped shadows across your jaw     I saw a picture
I want to dive into that darkness     smell
the rosewater     the sand     irreplaceable
jewel how much of the map did you leave
unfinished     there were so many spiders
your mouth a moonless system
of caves filling with dust
the dust thickened to tar
your mouth opened and tar spilled out

–“Palmyra”, by Kaveh Akbar

* The modern city of Palmyra (also called Tadmur) is adjacent to but not synonymous with the ancient city/archaeological site of Palmyra.

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2015: Mohammad Qamaruzzaman, militia commander

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On this date in 2015, Bangladesh hanged the former assistant secretary-general of the militant Jamaat-e-Islami party, Mohammad Qamaruzzaman.

He’d been sentenced for crimes against humanity during the 1971 war of independence that separated Bangladesh — the former “East Pakistan” — from Pakistan; his was just one of several high-profile 2010s prosecutions (and the second execution) by a special tribunal to settle scores from that bloody parting.

Jamaat-e-Islami’s party history traces back to the British Raj and versions of it exist in each of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. In the 1971 war, that Islamist party was ferociously anti-independence, collaborating with the Pakistani military’s violent attempted suppression of the rebellion; according to Al Jazeera, Qamaruzzaman was convicted of having “headed an armed group that collaborated with the Pakistani army in central Bangladesh in 1971 and was behind the killings of at least 120 unarmed farmers.”

Qamaruzzaman proudly (and also realistically) declined to bend the knee in hopes of an unlikely presidential pardon and swung serene in the rightness and future triumph of his cause.

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2015: A man in al-Shaddadah, “I won’t forgive you”

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On this date in 2015, Islamic State militants occupying the Syrian oil city of al-Shaddadah or al-Shaddadi horrifically beheaded a man on a public square.

Just what action was compassed in his alleged offense of “insulting Allah” is not known; neither so far as I can find was his name. But he fought his killers furiously, and four men were required to wrestle him into the dust and immobilize him for the executioner’s sword. “I won’t forgive you, I am not the one who did it but you did Arabs and civilians of al-Shadadi,” he cried out to townspeople unwilling or unable to lift a finger on his behalf against the butchers.

Al-Shaddadah was recaptured from ISIS in February 2016.

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2015: Siti Zainab

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On this date in 2015, in the Islamic holy city of Medina, Saudi Arabia beheaded Indonesian domestic worker Siti Zainab after a very long wait.

Zainab, a maid, was condemned to death in 1999 for stabbing to death her cruel* employer. Her execution went on pause for more than 15 years until all of the victim’s children could reach adulthood and exercise their right to enforce or mitigate the death sentence; still, for all that lead time, Saudi Arabia irked Jakarta by failing to notify consular offices of her impending beheading.

In addition to the usual controversies Saudi Arabia’s aggressive headsmen engender when dispatching the kingdom’s widely abused migrant workers, Zainab’s case raised hackles over the condemned woman’s alleged “suspected mental illness.”

* Cruel according to Zainab and her defenders. Indonesian NGO Migrant Care argued that the murder was outright self-defense.

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2015: Robert Ladd, “let’s ride”

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(Thanks to Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood — “pastor, theologian, activist, writer” — for the guest post, which originally appeared on his own site as part of his 2015 “Lenten Reflections from the Executed” series. -ed.)

“Let’s ride.”

We stop. We are afraid. We don’t want to move an inch. Danger is a paralyzing force. In the face of certain death, Robert Ladd looked danger in the eye and shrugged. If we place our trust in God, we too can have such confidence.

Staring down whatever danger you face, I invite you to pray the last words of Robert Ladd:

“Let’s ride.”

Amen.

(Ladd also wrote two letters to Gawker concerning his case and the mental disability that was at issue in his final appeals: 1 | 2)

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2015: Dok Macuei Marer, South Sudan assassin

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A year ago today, Dok Macuei Marer was executed by hanging at Wau Prison in South Sudan.

Dok assassinated tribal chief Chut Dhuol in August 2014, in a possible revenge killing for the previous murder of another chief. There is very little information about this whole affair readily accesible online, a circumstance consistent with the sketchy state of information about the death penalty in the world’s newest state. (Executed Today itself predates South Sudanese independence by four years.)

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2015: Aftab Bahadur Masih, “I just received my Black Warrant”

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A year ago today, Pakistan amid its ravenous 2015 execution binge hanged Aftab Bahadur Masih in Lahore for a 1992 murder.


Two faces of Aftab Bahadur Masih, separated by two decades on death row.

According to the anti-death penalty organization Reprieve, Masih was only 15 years old when he committed the crime. According to Masih himself, he never committed it at all — but instead was tortured into confession by the police.

Don’t take my word for it. Masih wrote a moving first-person essay for the Guardian that was published hours before his hanging.

I just received my Black Warrant. It says I will be hanged by the neck until dead on Wednesday, 10 June. I am innocent, but I do not know whether that will make any difference.

Read the rest here. Masih was also a self-taught painter; one of his products can be seen in this Wall Street Journal story.

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2015: A day in the death penalty around the world

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China

The People’s Court of Gansu executed former elementary school teacher Li Jishun for a spree of sexually assaulting 26 girls ages 4 to 12 in his care in 2011-2012.

“He took advantage of his status as teacher to repeatedly rape and molest the young girls, concealing his crimes and making it more difficult for his victims to resist and expose him,” China’s Supreme Court said in upholding the sentence.

China’s Xinhua news agency has reported that child sexual assault cases are on the rise by some 40%, but Li’s crimes carried an especially painful resonance: many of the victims had been given up to these school dormitories by parents who were compelled to leave impoverished Gansu to seek work in the cities.

Pakistan

Pakistan, which broke a years-long moratorium with a positive execution binge in 2015, hanged eight men on May 28 in various jails around the country.

The most noteworthy were three ethnic Balochs, Shawsawar Baloch, Sabir Rind, and Shabbir Rind.

The three Baloch Student Organization insurgents/terrorists had in 1998 commandeered a Pakistan International Airline flight bound for Karachi, Arghanistan, trying to draw attention to their native Balochistan‘s poverty and to protest the nuclear tests Pakistan was about to conduct there.

The plane’s pilot fooled the hijackers into believing he had met their demand to fly to India — but instead touched down in Hyderabad where Pakistani troops stormed the plane and arrested the men without any casualties.

The nuclear tests went off as planned, on May 28, 1998: seventeen years to the day before the Baloch revolutionaries’ hangings.


Pakistan plane hijackers hanged by dawn-news

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia has long been prolific in its use of capital punishment, but recent years have seen its signature swordsmen so busy that the kingdom has advertised to hire more.

Last May 28, Saudi Arabia carried out its 90th execution of 2015, a figure surpassing the sum for all of 2014, which was in its turn up from previous years — a trend that the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, and Arbitrary Executions called “very disturbing.”

(Note, however, that Saudi executions have often tended to proceed with spurts and lulls.)

The man on the end of the sword was Ihsan Amin, a heroin smuggler and Pakistani national: around half of the humans Saudi Arabia beheaded during this execution surge were foreigners, including ten Pakistanis.

Part of the Themed Set: The 2010s.

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2015: Liu Han, former tycoon

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One year ago today, Chinese billionaire Liu Han was executed in Hubei province, along with his younger brother Liu Wei and thee other associates.

One of the prime catches in the anti-corruption hunt of current president Xi Jinping, Liu was a mining oligarch whose personal fortune was once valued at $6.4 billion.

He was also allegedly “an organized crime boss that no one dared provoke”. He was arrested early in 2014 for embezzlement, gun-running, and orchestrating a hit on a rival crime lord.

Liu’s fall was widely perceived as a strike against his close ally, the powerful former security minister Zhou Yongkang. After months — years even — of rumors about his impending fate, Zhou was arrested for corruption in December 2014; he has since been sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison.

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2015: Laila Bint Abdul Muttalib Basim, filmed

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Last year on this date, Saudi Arabia’s execution wave consumed a Burmese woman named Laila Bint Abdul Muttalib Basim.

Condemned for the murder and sexual abuse of her seven-year-old stepdaughter, Basim went to her public beheading protesting her innocence and resisting in whatever way she could — which we know, because a cell phone recording of the execution attained worldwide dissemination. In it, the black-shrouded condemned shrieks over and over, “I did not kill! This is unjust!” She denounces her executioners, invokes the Shahada … until her throat is horrifically emptied of its last protest by the blade.

Warning: This is the on-camera death of a human being from just a few meters’ distance, obtained via Liveleak. It’s awful.

Thanks to the outrage this video spawned, a “human rights organization” underwritten by the Saudi government demanded the arrest of the person who recorded the video … which did indeed occur.

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