RIYADH — Saudi Arabia has executed 81 people convicted of crimes including murder, rape, arms smuggling and links to terrorist groups in the largest known mass execution in the kingdom’s history.
Most of those executed on Saturday were Saudis, according to the Interior Ministry. More than half were from the Shiite Muslim minority, which has a history of militancy and protest against discrimination. Seven were Yemeni citizens and one was Syrian.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs does not disclose how the men were killed. Executions in the past have included beheadings with a sword in a kingdom that remains one of the best executioners in the world despite recent efforts to curb the use of the death penalty.
Human rights organizations have called on the leadership of Saudi Arabia to abolish the death penalty and improve the country’s justice system to ensure a fair trial. Saudi authorities deny flaws in the system.
The Ministry of the Interior said the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Saudi Arabia have reviewed the cases of all those executed and the sentences have been confirmed by royal decree.
“The Ministry of the Interior is announcing this to assure everyone that this country…will not hesitate to deter anyone who threatens security or disrupts public life…,” the message says.
Shabbat executions are the highest in Saudi Arabia in a single day, surpassing the 63 people killed in January 1980 in connection with the takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by a group of Saudi extremists who took hostages and held Islam’s holiest site for two weeks prior. security forces brought him back in a military operation.
The country has recently come under sporadic attacks from Islamic State-linked militants and has faced regular drone and rocket attacks by the Houthi rebels, the Iranian-backed group that the country has been fighting since it intervened in Yemen’s civil war in 2015. Seven of those executed were, according to the Interior Ministry, two brothers were convicted of attacking a Shiite gathering in the city of Al-Ahsa in 2014, and two brothers were convicted of killing their mother and attempting to kill their father.
In 2019, Saudi Arabia was second only to China and Iran in the number of executions. That year, some 37 mostly Shia Muslim men were executed across the country in a single day, and three years earlier, the execution of a prominent Shia cleric and dozens of al-Qaeda members sparked sectarian tensions in the region.
Last year, the government said it had imposed a moratorium on the death penalty for drug-related crimes, resulting in an 85% reduction in executions in 2020, and said it would stop executing people who committed crimes as minors.
Reprieve, a UK-based human rights group, called the executions “a brutal display of impunity” and said it feared for other people on death row in Saudi Arabia.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s current ruler, said he was working to change the law to reduce punishment for some crimes from execution to life in prison. According to him, in accordance with Islamic law, the death penalty will remain in force for murder. It has also been used against people convicted of rape, incest, apostasy, and terrorism.
The Kingdom is facing scrutiny for its human rights record, which goes beyond liberal use of the death penalty. He drew international condemnation for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the detention of women’s rights activists as part of a crackdown on dissent.
In recent years, many executions have been moved from public squares to prisons, sidestepping the spectacle as the conservative Muslim kingdom seeks to tone down its image to attract Western tourists and foreign investment.
Write to Stephen Kalin at [email protected] and Summer Said at [email protected]
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