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Saudi Arabia executes 47, including Shiite cleric
Almost all executions carried out in Saudi Arabia are by beheading with a sword.
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The nation detained thousands of militant Islamists after a series of al Qaeda attacks from 2003-06 that killed hundreds, and has convicted hundreds of them.
The 47 men were based across 12 regions in the kingdom, the interior ministry statement added. He was arrested in 2004.
All but two – an Egyptian and a Chadian- were Saudi nationals.
Nimr’s nephew Ali al-Nimr, who was convicted of crimes including belonging to a terror cell and attacking police, was not among those executed, according to the Interior Ministry.
It is the most people put to death in the kingdom in one year since 1995, when 192 executions were reportedly carried out.
Under Saudi Arabia’s reading of Islamic Sharia, such attacks are interpreted as “banditry”, which carries an automatic sentence of death followed by public display of bodies on gibbets. “We were shocked by this harsh news”.
Justice Ministry spokesman Mansour Kafari said on television another four prisoners remained on death row for acts of terrorism.
Under the kingdom’s strict Islamic legal code, murder, drug trafficking, armed robbery, rape and apostasy are all punishable by death.
Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami’s comments came as Iran’s foreign minister warned Saudi Arabia would pay a “high price” for following policies that led to the execution of al-Nimr and 46 others for “terrorism offences”.
It called on the Iraqi government to “reconsider the benefit of having a Saudi embassy in Iraq, with a suspicious ambassador and goals”.
His brother, Mohammed al-Nimr, said he hoped any reaction to the execution would be peaceful.
The office of Hadi al-Mudaressi, an Iraqi cleric whose brother has a strong following among Bahraini Shiites notably, organised a protest near the mausoleum of Imam Hussein in Karbala.
“There will be negative reactions from within the kingdom and overseas”. “We hope that any reactions would be confined to a peaceful framework”.
In defense of how Saudi Arabia applies Shariah, the kingdom’s representative to the U.N. Human Rights Council, Bandar al-Aiban, said in an address in Geneva in March that capital punishment applies “only (to) those who commit heinous crimes that threaten security”.
Amnesty says Saudi Arabia had the world’s third-highest number of executions past year, after China and Iran.
Al-Nimr was a central figure in Shiite protests that erupted in 2011 as part of the Arab Spring.
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“Iran executes far more people a year than Saudi Arabia, but it does not get the negative publicity Saudi Arabia has”.