Saudi Arabia advertises for eight new executioners as beheading rate soars

Saudi Arabia posted job advertisements for eight new executioners in May 2015, seeking extra staff to carry out a fast-rising number of death sentences — most of them by public beheading.

The job ad, published on the kingdom's civil service jobs portal, required no special qualifications. The main duty was described as "executing a judgment of death," and the role also involved performing amputations ordered as punishments for lesser offences. The positions were classified as "religious functionaries" and paid at the lower end of the civil service scale.

The hiring drive came as the country's execution rate surged. The man beheaded on Sunday, May 17, was the 85th person executed in 2015 whose death was recorded by the official Saudi Press Agency — nearly matching the 88 executions recorded in all of 2014, according to Human Rights Watch. Amnesty International put the 2014 figure at at least 90. Most of those executed were convicted of murder, but 38 had committed drug offences, HRW said. About half were Saudi nationals; the others came from countries including Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Jordan, India, Indonesia, Burma, Chad, Eritrea, the Philippines and Sudan.

Rights groups rank Saudi Arabia among the world's top five executioners. It stood third in 2014 — after China and Iran, and ahead of Iraq and the United States — according to Amnesty International's figures.

Saudi authorities did not explain the sharp rise. Diplomats speculated that newly appointed judges had helped clear a backlog of appeal cases, while political analysts suggested the judiciary was responding firmly to regional turbulence.

Source: The Guardian (May 18, 2015)