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In a prison in northern Saudi Arabia, Mohammed, like many others sentenced to death for drug trafficking, lives in agony over his execution, an increasingly common punishment for drug traffickers in the country.
“We don’t know who’s next,” he said.
Around 50 inmates are waiting to die at any moment in Tabuk prison near the Jordanian border, they told AFP by telephone.
“They don’t tell us in advance that we’re going to say goodbye to our families, and they don’t prepare us mentally,” said Mohammed, a former hotel manager in Riyadh who was arrested in 2015 for receiving a shipment of furniture filled with drugs.
Next? “Maybe it’s me or my friends,” a 40-year-old Egyptian man, who did not want to give his name for fear of reprisals, cried.
The Gulf kingdom has seen an increase in the number of drug traffickers executed since it imposed a moratorium on executions two years ago, sparking outrage from human rights groups and concern among prisoners.
Saudi Arabia has executed 28 people convicted of drug trafficking since May, compared with just two in all of 2023, according to an AFP calculation based on official statements.
They included two Egyptians, Faruk and Yussef Kleib, who were convicted of trafficking marijuana and amphetamines. They ate their last meal, unaware that they would be executed the next morning, according to the official Saudi news agency SPA.
A total of 170 people were executed in the country last year, the third-highest number of executions in the world, after China and Iran.
For Saudi authorities, the death penalty is in line with Islamic law and necessary to “maintain public order.”
– NGOs criticize unacceptable executions –
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has sought to transform the conservative kingdom into a hub for business and tourism, said things were changing.
In March 2022, he told The Atlantic, a state-run publication, that his country had “abolished” the death penalty, except in cases of homicide or “threats to the lives of a large number of people.”
However, in November of the same year, executions in drug-related cases resumed, ending a moratorium on executions announced by the Saudi Human Rights Commission three years earlier.
After being imprisoned in Tabuk, Mohammed believed that “life had given him a new chance.” But that hope was dashed with the execution of 19 people convicted of drug trafficking in 2022.
Saudi Arabia is an important market for Captagon, a drug from the amphetamine family that is produced in Syria and Lebanon.
Authorities launched a much-publicised anti-drug campaign last year that resulted in a string of drug seizures and arrests.
“We believe that this campaign has increased the number of prisoners in jails and that the recent executions appear to be an attempt to close some outstanding cases,” said Duaa Dhainy, a researcher at the European Saudi Organization for Human Rights (ESOHR) in Berlin.
For human rights groups such as ESOHR, Amnesty and Reprieve, these executions are unacceptable because, among other considerations, they claim that the justice system has many flaws.
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