On this date in 2010, a Saudi Arabian man named Mohsen al-Dossary or al-Dussari was beheaded in Riyadh for having shot dead a police officer in nearby Kharj who tried to stop him driving the wrong way on a street.
That’s some costly road rage.
Islamic sharia law provides the victim’s family the right to pardon an offender and stop an execution; implicit in that right is the need for the offended family to make a legally supportable determination to withhold pardon in order for an execution to proceed. In an interesting twist on that jurisprudence, the Saudi Press Agency reported that al-Dossary had to wait several years in prison while the policeman’s sons grew to majority and could legally consent to having the murderer put to death.
On this day..
- 1663: Volkmar Limprecht
- 1928: William Charles Benson
- 2013: Joseph Paul Franklin, Larry Flynt's would-be assassin
- 1781: Margaret Tinkler, abortionist
- 1829: The slaves of the Greenup revolt
- 1936: Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, Falange founder
- 1903: Peter Mortensen, divinely accused
- 869 or 870: St. Edmund the Martyr
- 1903: Tom Horn
- 1676: Johan Johansson Griis, the Gävle Boy
- 284: Aper, by Diocletian
- 1695: Zumbi dos Palmares