By John Ikani
Saudi Arabia on Saturday said it executed a record 81 people in one day for a variety of terrorism-related offences.
All had been “found guilty of committing multiple heinous crimes”, the official Saudi Press Agency (SPA) reported, saying they included convicts linked to the Islamic State group, Al-Qaeda, Yemen’s Huthi rebel forces or “other terrorist organisations.
Saturday’s executions exceeded the total number of persons executed last year in wealthy Gulf country, sparking criticism from rights activists.
The number dwarfed the 67 executions reported in the kingdom in 2021 and the 27 in 2020.
Saudi has one of the world’s highest execution rates, and has often carried out previous death sentences by beheading.
Those executed had been sentenced over plotting attacks in the kingdom — including killing “a large number” of civilians and members of the security forces, the SPA statement read.
“They also include convictions for targeting government personnel and vital economic sites and planting land mines to target police vehicles,” the SPA said.
“The convictions include crimes of kidnapping, torture, rape, smuggling arms and bombs into the kingdom,” it added.
Of the 81 people killed, 73 were Saudi citizens, seven were Yemeni and one was a Syrian national.
SPA said the accused were provided with the right to a lawyer and were guaranteed their full rights under Saudi law during the judicial process.
Saudi Arabia’s last mass execution was in January 2016, when the kingdom executed 47 people, including a prominent opposition Shia leader who had rallied demonstrations in the kingdom.
In 2019, the kingdom beheaded 37 Saudi citizens, most of them minority Shia, in a mass execution across the country for alleged “terrorism”-related crimes.
Saudi Arabia’s human rights records have been under increasing scrutiny from rights groups and Western allies since the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
It has faced strong criticism of its restrictive laws on political and religious expression, and the implementation of the death penalty, including for defendants arrested when they were minors.
Saudi Arabia denies accusations of human rights abuses and says it protects its national security according to its laws.
