Saudi Arabia Puts 47 To Death, Including Prominent Shiite Cleric

Saudi Arabia executed 47 people convicted of terrorism-related offenses on Saturday, including suspected members of Al Qaeda and a prominent cleric and government critic from the country’s Shiite minority.

The executions, which were reported by the Saudi state news media, were the first of 2016 and followed a year in which at least 157 people were put to death, the most in two decades in the conservative Muslim kingdom.

While most of those executed Saturday had been convicted of involvement with Al Qaeda during a wave of attacks about a decade ago, they also included Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a prominent Shiite cleric and outspoken campaigner for Shiite rights.

Sheikh Nimr, who was arrested in 2012, had harshly criticized the Sunni monarchy of neighboring Bahrain for its violent suppression of protests by its own Shiite population after the start of the so-called Arab Spring in 2011. The Saudi government accused him of fueling violent dissent among Saudi Arabia’s Shiites, which he denied.

It was not immediately clear how the executions Saturday were carried out, though most in Saudi Arabia are beheadings carried out in public squares, which Saudi officials say serve to deter crime.

Sheikh Nimr’s execution is likely to further exacerbate tensions between the Saudi government, which is dominated by a Sunni royal family, and Shiites across the region. Iran, a Shiite country and Saudi Arabia’s main regional rival, had warned that executing Sheikh Nimr “would cost Saudi Arabia dearly.”

The cleric’s arrest, in July 2012, came as Saudi Arabia led a group of regional monarchies in violently pushing back against the pro-democratic activism and protests that swept the region during the Arab Spring.

The Saudi government’s fears of unrest prompted it to intervene to prop up the monarchy in Bahrain, which faced protests from a Shiite-led pro-democracy movement. In Saudi Arabia, the focal point of protests was in the oil-rich Eastern Province, where many Shiites live and often complain of official discrimination by the Sunni monarchy.

Sheikh Nimr, based in the Eastern Province town of Awamiyah, had long been a fierce critic of the monarchy and played a leading role in the protests. Hundreds of people demonstrated in the province after video emerged of his arrest, which showed him bleeding while in custody. The government said he had been injured in a shootout. Sheikh Nimr faced charges including sedition and was sentenced to death in October 2014.

The executions Saturday came as Saudi Arabia seeks to battle accusations that its justice system, which is based on a strict interpretation of Shariah law, uses methods similar to those of the Islamic State extremist group. Saudi officials bristle at such comparisons, saying that unlike the Islamic State, which has made a trademark of its grisly videos of executions of captives and members of religious minorities, their government puts to death only people who have been convicted in court of grave crimes.

In 2015, a year that began with the inauguration of a new monarch, King Salman, Saudi Arabia executed at least 157 people, up from 90 in 2014. Saudi officials have argued that the sharp increase, which was strongly criticized by human rights groups, reflected not a change in policy but a backlog of death sentences that had built up in the final years of the previous monarch, King Abdullah.

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