AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
Hajras al-Qurey will become the latest person to be executed in the last three weeks with human rights groups horrified by what they are calling a surge in executions.
The execution of al-Qurey will top off a deadly week around the world with the beheading of an Egyptian man by Libya armed groups and the execution of 18 informers by Hamas, according to Amnesty International.
Last Monday four men — two sets of brothers Hadi bin Saleh Abdullah al-Mutlaq and Awad bin Saleh Abdullah al-Mutlaq along with Mufrih bin Jaber Zayd al-Yami and Ali bin Jaber Zayd al-Yami — were beheaded.
Amnesty claims they were sentenced to death largely on false confessions they gave.
According to Amnesty, there has been a surge in executions in Saudi Arabia since the end of Ramadan on July 28, with 22 executions taking place between August 4 and August 22, compared to 17 executions between January and July this year.
Amnesty International said called on the Kingdom to halt all executions after four members of the same family were beheaded for “receiving drugs”.
Said Boumedouha, Deputy Director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Program, said the execution of people accused of petty crimes and on the basis of confessions extracted through torture had become shamefully common in Saudi Arabia.
“The use of the death penalty in Saudi Arabia is so far removed from any kind of legal parameters that it is almost hard to believe” Mr Boumedouha said.
Hajras al-Qurey, 53, was sentenced to death on 16 January last year in the south-eastern city of Najran on drug-trafficking charges.
He was arrested, together with his son Muhammad, on 7 January 2012 at the al-Khadra border crossing with Yemen, when customs officers suspected they were carrying drugs in their car.
His son was sentenced to 20 years in prison and 1000 lashes.
But according to Amnesty, both men claim they were tortured during their interrogation and were denied access to their lawyers.
Their families were also told to stop appealing to human rights organizations to save them from execution.
“That people are tortured into confessing to crimes, convicted in shameful trials without adequate legal support and then executed is a sickening indictment of the Kingdom’s state-sanctioned brutality,” Mr Boumedouha said.
“It is clear that the authorities are more interested in threatening victims’ families to shut them up rather than putting an end to this grotesque phenomenon.”
A deadly August is just the tip of the iceberg for Saudi Arabia which executed more than 2000 people between 1985 and 2013, figures provided by the human rights group reveal.
According to them, trials in capital cases are often held in secret and defendants are given no or insufficient access to lawyers.
And people in Saudi can be executed for a range of crimes including adultery, armed robbery, apostasy, drug-related offences, rape, witchcraft and sorcery.
Most executions are done by beheading and many take place in public.
In some cases decapitated bodies are left lying on the ground in public squares as a “deterrent”.
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