Saudi
authorities on Wednesday beheaded a Pakistani for smuggling drugs and a
national for killing a compatriot, the interior ministry said, bringing the
number of executions in the kingdom this year to nine.
Mohammed
Asharaf Ramadan was caught attempting to smuggle into the kingdom an amount of
heroin that he swallowed, the ministry said in a statement carried by SPA state
news agency.
He
was executed in Riyadh.
In
another case, Saudi national Turki Ahmed al-Salami, was executed in the
southwestern Asir region after he was convicted of shooting dead Salman
Subaykhi, the ministry said in a separate statement.
Saudi
Arabia beheaded 78 people in 2013, according to an AFP count.
Last
year, the UN High Commission for Human Rights denounced a “sharp increase in
the use of capital punishment” since 2011 in the kingdom.
According
to figures from Amnesty International, the number of executions in Saudi Arabia
jumped from 27 in 2010, of whom five were foreigners, to 82 in 2011, including
28 foreigners.
In
2012, the number of executions slipped slightly to 79 people, among them 27
foreign nationals.
Rape,
murder, apostasy, armed robbery and drug trafficking are all punishable by
death under the conservative kingdom’s strict version of Islamic sharia law.
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