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Saudi authorities executed a prince in Riyadh on Tuesday after a
court found him guilty of murder, according to the Saudi state news
agency. Prince Turki Bin Saud Al-Kabir was the first member of royalty
executed in the Gulf Kingdom since 1975. How did Kabir become the first Saudi royal to be executed for more than four decades?
Kabir pleaded guilty
to the shooting and killing of fellow Saudi citizen Adel bin Suleiman
bin Abdulkareem Al-Muhaimeed during a mass brawl, according to Saudi
state media. A court found him guilty three years ago for the incident
in the al-Thumama region, on the outskirts of Riyadh. Because the victim’s family rejected offers of money in return for clemency, he was sentenced to the death penalty.
The
country’s General Court sentenced him to death, a ruling supported by
the Supreme Court, before a royal decree ordered the sentence be carried
out. Saudi state news did not say how authorities carried out the
execution but capital punishment is regularly carried out in public in the kingdom.
In
a statement, the Interior Ministry said that the death penalty showed
that it cared about “security, justice and safety for all,” online site
Arab News reported. The country follows a strict conservative brand of Wahhabi Islam, in which sharia law is implemented for criminal acts.
Prominent Prince
Neither
the Saudi state news agency nor the Interior Ministry did not release
personal details about Kabir, a typical trend in the conservative
Islamic country. Alleged images of Kabir were circulating on Twitter but
Newsweek could not verify their authenticity.
Prince Faisal bin Farhan al-Saud, a member of the royal family, speaking to the New York Times by telephone, said that Kabir was a member of one of the most important branches of the royal family.
However,
he was not in the line of descendents of King Abdulaziz, the leader who
founded the country in 1932. Every Saudi king has been a son of the
kingdom’s founding father and present King Salman belongs to this
lineage. His family ties had no impact on the court’s decision, al-Saud
added.
The king has always said that there is no difference in the law
between princes and others, and I think that this is clear manifestation
of the reality of that fact,” he told the newspaper.
One commentator on Saudi Arabia, who did not wish to be quoted speaking about the prince’s execution, told Newsweek that while Kabir was not in line with Abdulaziz, he was not “from the periphery” and was not “unimportant.”
Justice for all
Kabir’s
execution sparked much conversation on Saudi social media, with
commentators from different sections of the country’s society taking to
Twitter, mostly in support of the Saudi authorities decision to treat
him like any other Saudi citizen.
The hashtag “Decisive Salman
orders retribution for the prince” began to pick up traction on Twitter
in support of the country’s monarch. But Mohammed Khalid Alyahya,
non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council, says Kabir’s execution is
“nothing really significant in Saudi” because princes are held to the
same legal standards as others.
“It’s really made the rounds in
U.S. and Western media because there is this perception that princes are
above the law in Saudi Arabia,” he says. “It’s very clear, if a family
[of the victim] agrees to give him clemency then he is exempt from the
execution, if they don’t then it goes through. There is no way around
it.”
May Romanos, Saudi Arabia Researcher at Amnesty International
released a statement on the execution to Newsweek: “The death penalty is
a cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment and should not be applied in
any circumstances. Whether the accused is a prince, an ordinary Saudi
Arabian citizen or a migrant worker makes no difference whatsoever—no
one should be sentenced to death or executed.”
Explaining the big
time difference between the royal executions, Alyahya says there have
not “been many murder cases involving members of the royal family in the
past several decades to my knowledge.”
Saudi’s ageing royal elite
is one at odds with a youthful society, where more than half of the
country’s population is now aged under 25. The House of Saud holds great
wealth and its thousands of members enjoy a life of luxury in
comparison with those who fall outside its lineage.
The decision
appears to be a demonstration that there is no one exempt from the
strict laws that regular citizens are held to on a daily basis. The
Interior Ministry conveyed this in their statement, saying that the
“legitimate punishment would be the fate of whoever tries to assault
innocent people and shed their blood.”
