Kuwait Times
May 17, 2007
RIYADH: Saudi authorities yesterday beheaded two Ethiopians convicted of killing a Saudi national in an armed robbery and displayed their bodies in public after the execution, the Interior Ministry said in a statement. The statement, carried by the official Saudi Press Agency, said Ali Mohammed Ali and Adel Adam Aman were found guilty of fatally shooting and robbing Khaled bin Karim bin Bakhash, the owner of a private telephone services center.
A court ordered their bodies be displayed in a public place after the execution as a further deterrent “because of the hideousness nature of the crime.” The statement said they were executed in Jiddah but did not say specifically where their bodies were displayed. The process of displaying the body of an executed person is usually carried out by the executioners who fix the chopped head to the body and then either hang it from a pole or from a mosque window or balcony for about two hours during the noon prayer.
The beheaded bodies are only displayed when there is a specific court order in cases considered particularly brutal, such as committing murder during an armed robbery. In February, the bodies of four Sri Lankans were strung up and displayed in a Saudi public square after they were beheaded for armed robbery, drawing criticism from Human Rights Watch, which said the kingdom violated international law because they men did not have lawyers.
Separately, the Interior Ministry said in another statement that a Saudi national, Jalal bin Ahmed al-Marhoun, was executed yesterday in the northern city of Al-Jawf, after being convicted of smuggling hashish into the country. Saudi Arabia follows a strict interpretation of Islam under which people convicted of murder, drug trafficking, rape and armed robbery can be executed. Beheadings are carried out with a sword in a public square. Yesterday’s executions brought to 70 the number of people, including two women, beheaded in the kingdom this year. The kingdom beheaded 38 people last year and 83 people in 2005.
Also, Saudi Arabia beheaded a Saudi yesterday as it kept up a relentless pace of executions that has seen 77 convicts put to the sword already this year. The Saudi authorities have now carried out more than twice as many executions this year as in the whole of 2006 with more than six months still to go. Last year, 37 people were executed in the conservative Gulf kingdom, while 83 were put to death in 2005 and 35 the year before, according to AFP tallies based on official statements. The spate of executions has sparked mounting concern in Canada, which has two nationals facing possible death sentences for a murder they insist they did not commit.
Mohamed Kohail, 22, of Palestinian origin, was arrested in January and accused of killing a Syrian youth in a vicious schoolyard brawl in Jeddah, Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper reported on Tuesday. His 16-year-old brother Sultan is also being held in relation to the death. In an interview by mobile phone from his prison cell, Kohail told the newspaper he had been pushed, slapped and abused, and forced into signing a false confession. Local police told him to admit to hitting the Syrian schoolboy if he wished to avoid a lengthy prison term, unaware the boy had died, he said, but after signing the document, he was charged with the boy’s murder.
Until last year, Kohail had lived with his family in a Montreal suburb, but returned to Saudi Arabia, where he was born, when his sister became ill, he said. Rodney Moore, a spokesman for Canada’s foreign affairs department, acknowledged that Canadian officials are “aware of the arrest of two Canadian citizens in Saudi Arabia.” Consular officials have met with Saudi officials, Kohail and his family, Moore said, but refused to offer details because of Canadian privacy laws. Executions are usually carried out in public in Saudi Arabia, which applies a strict form of sharia, or Islamic law. Rape, murder, apostasy, armed robbery and drug trafficking can all carry the death penalty. – Agencies