SAUDI ARABIA: Four Sri Lankans beheaded in Saudi Arabia this week for armed robbery suffered a sham trial and two of the men may not have known they were sentenced to death, according to an international human rights group.
The bodies of the four men, beheaded by sword in a public square in Riyadh on Monday, were displayed on wooden crosses for over an hour as a deterrent, amid fears of an increase in organised crime among expatriates.
The kingdom, which is home to Islam's holiest shrines, applies strict Islamic law and regularly beheads murderers, rapists and drug traffickers.
A Saudi executed yesterday for sexually abusing a child was at least the 17th person put to death in the country this year.
New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), which followed the Sri Lankan case and said it spoke to one of the men by telephone several days before execution, said they were victims of poverty and arbitrary justice that denied them legal representation.
"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," the group's Middle East and North Africa director Sarah Leah Whitson said in a statement.
One of the men, Ranjith de Silva, told the group he had been driven to commit the crimes in 2004 by "financial desperation". He said he came to the country for work paying 400 riyals per month (€81), but his employer only paid him 250 riyals.