Mick Hartley

It’s been a bumper year for beheadings in Saudi Arabia:

Saudi authorities on Sunday beheaded a citizen convicted of shooting a man in the head with an assault rifle, the Interior Ministry said.

In a statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency, the ministry said that Ali bin Suweid Al-Domnan killed Diyab bin Ali al-Mansour following an argument in the southern city of Najran.

Saudi Arabia follows a strict interpretation of Islam under which those convicted of murder, drug trafficking, rape and armed robbery are executed in public with a sword.

Sunday’s execution brought to 136 the number of people beheaded in the kingdom this year, according to an Associated Press count. Saudi Arabia beheaded 38 people last year and 83 people in 2005.

Here’s what happens at a public execution:

In the center of the square, flanked by the imam, the prison warden and a few police officers, kneels the prisoner. He faces the victim’s family, who are waiting for him to die. He may beg them to forgive him. They may choose to do so.

The crowd shouts at the prisoner, reminding him of his Shahada, or at the victim’s family, asking for forgiveness.

The prisoner is examined by a doctor, and most of the time he is given a sedative to help him get a hold of himself. Across the square, the prisoner’s family are weeping and begging the victim’s family to forgive. A medical team and Red Crescent ambulances are standing by.

The prisoner now recites verses from the Qur’an while a government official reads the charges and the verdict. Halfway through the reading the executioner suddenly nicks the back of the prisoner’s neck with his sword, causing him to tense and raise his head involuntarily.

Then, in one swift move, the executioner separates the prisoner’s head from his body. Several spectators faint, and the executioner is pulled from the scene lest he get carried away and injure someone else with his sword.

This is the scenario unless the victim’s family forgive the prisoner at the last minute, in which case the atmosphere all of a sudden changes to the joy one might expect at a wedding, with people cheering and blessing the family.

The reaction of the spectators can vary widely. At the execution of three men for murder, the family of the victim were screaming hysterically for the loss of their father. The audience shouted at the executioner: “Kill these criminals. Take off their heads. God bless you.” There was a common feeling of anger toward the three killers, and each time the executioner took off a head, the shout went up: “Allahu Akbar (God is great).”

On another occasion the victim’s father delighted the audience seconds before the execution by walking into the middle of the square and announcing that he forgave the prisoner.

Execution by sword is usually reserved for men, while women are shot.

Not all trials meet the highest standards. From February this year:

A human rights group said Thursday that Saudi Arabia violated international law when it ordered the beheadings earlier this week of four Sri Lankan robbers and then left their headless bodies on public display in the capital of Riyadh.

Human Rights Watch said the four men had no lawyers during their trial and sentencing, and were denied other basic legal rights. The group called on Saudi Arabia to halt all pending executions and retry those remaining on death row.

“The execution of these four migrants, who had been badly beaten and locked up for years without access to lawyers, is a travesty of justice,” Sarah Leah Whitson, the Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said in a report…

Earlier in February, investigators from the New York-based Human Rights Watch had met and spoken to one of the four, Ranjith Silva. According to the group’s report, Silva was apparently unaware of his imminent execution and was hopeful for clemency.

Silva said he and Victor Corea, Sanath Pushpakumara, and Sharmila Sangeeth Kumara, took up armed robberies in early 2004 because their Saudi employer was paying them each only $67 of the $107 a month agreed in their contract — money that barely covered lodgings.

Silva also told the Human Rights Watch he was never advised he could see a lawyer or that he could face the death penalty. The four were not notified of proceedings ahead of time and had no consular assistance.

Silva also said he was not told how to appeal the verdict and never received a copy of the verdict.

“Defendants sentenced to death must, under international law, have a meaningful right to appeal their verdicts, but these men didn’t get the most basic safeguards,” Whitson said.

According to an Amnesty International report earlier this week, two of the four may even have been unaware that they had been sentenced to death. The group reported that Sharmila Sangeeth Kumara believed he had been sentenced to 15 years in prison.

After the trial, the Sri Lankans managed to contact their embassy from prison, but were told it was too late to appoint a lawyer. The Sri Lankan government said it had appealed to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia for clemency twice and was now trying to retrieve the bodies.