Saudi cracks down on drugs, executions near a record high

Facing an influx of amphetamines, the kingdom has put hundreds of people to death, many of them foreigners convicted of low-level smuggling.

The number of executions in Saudi Arabia has soared as officials wage what they are calling a far-reaching “war on drugs,” deploying the death penalty against smugglers who ferry hashish and amphetamine pills into the kingdom. The Saudi government has disclosed at least 320 executions so far this year. That number has risen sharply over the past three years, despite past pledges by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to curb the practice.

Two-thirds of executions this year have been related to drug offenses, according to Reprieve, a human rights group based in London. Saudi officials have argued that drug smugglers deserve harsh punishment because the crime is akin to a violent attack on their conservative Islamic society.

However, human rights activists who track capital punishment cases in the kingdom say that low-income foreigners, from countries including Egypt, Ethiopia and Somalia, are disproportionately represented on death row.

In court documents reviewed by The New York Times, and interviews with relatives, some of those facing the death penalty appear to be low-level smugglers who say they were coerced into carrying drugs.

“They are the weakest link in the drug trade,” said Taha al-Hajji, a Saudi lawyer and human rights activist who lives in exile.

Al-Hajji said that many of the defendants sentenced to death for drug offenses are poor foreign citizens, like drivers and labourers. It is unclear if the Saudi government has also arrested and executed major traffickers.

The case of Issam Shazley, an Egyptian fisherman sentenced to death in 2022, exemplifies the inequities of the crackdown, human rights activists say. Shazley, then 24, was arrested by Saudi border guards in 2022 while floating in the narrow channel of water between Saudi Arabia and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. In a voice recording from prison, shared with the Times by a relative, Shazley said that drug traffickers had forced him onto a boat at gunpoint. Court documents reviewed by the Times indicated that he said traffickers had forced him to swim to shore with an inner tube stuffed with pills.

Saudi prosecutors, however, said Shazley had agreed to smuggle 334,000 amphetamine pills in exchange for a payment of around $3,000. The street value of the pills would be several million dollars. Shazley is now awaiting execution alongside dozens of other prisoners with similar cases.

“We hear the argument that Saudi Arabia is trying to tackle a drug problem, and that may be true, but the way they are going about it is completely wrong,” said Jeed Basyouni, who researches the death penalty in the region for Reprieve. “They are targeting the most vulnerable — foreign nationals, trafficking victims — people who had no power or knowledge of what they were caught in.”

The Saudi government did not respond to questions and requests for comment from the Times.

“In the light of their devastating consequences,” some drug crimes are “on a par with murder,” the Saudi government wrote in January, responding to a letter from United Nations special rapporteurs about the planned executions of 29 foreign citizens.

“The death penalty is imposed only for the most serious crimes and in extremely limited circumstances,” the Saudi government wrote.

Crown Prince Mohammed, the 40-year-old de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, has led the kingdom through a dizzying transformation over the past decade, loosening social restrictions while cracking down politically as he tries to turn the country into a global hub for business, technology and tourism.

The religious police, who used to roam the streets searching for unmarried couples, have been stripped of their powers, allowing teenagers to flirt openly at cafés, local clubs and government-backed raves.

“The same country that promotes concerts and raves is executing people who may have supplied the drugs used at those parties,” Basyouni said.

A decade ago, Saudi Arabia still beheaded convicted criminals in public squares, applying the death penalty for a wide range of offenses, including murder, rape and “sorcery.” But in an interview with Time magazine in 2018, Crown Prince Mohammed said that the kingdom would reduce the use of capital punishment, “big time.”

In 2020, the number of executions in Saudi Arabia fell to 27, according to the government-backed Human Rights Commission, which issued a celebratory statement — crediting a previously unannounced moratorium on executions for drug-related crimes. Executions no longer occur in public, according to rights monitors. The Riyadh plaza where people were once beheaded is now a tourist hub where visitors sip matcha lattes.

But in 2022, the moratorium on drug-related executions ended without explanation. Since then, the number of executions has risen to the highest level since rights groups began documenting annual figures in the early 1990s. This year, it is on course to surpass last year’s record high of 345, according to Amnesty International.

So far this year, more than 90 executions have been for charges solely related to hashish, according to Reprieve.

The government’s crackdown on drugs started in 2023, when officials began focusing on dealers and users, and creating public campaigns that warned of the consequences of addiction. It is unclear how widespread drug use is in the kingdom, where public data is limited.

Local media began publishing grim stories like that of Barakat al-Kinani, a Saudi man who was convicted of consuming a methamphetamine and killing a friend, Bandar al-Qarhadi, by setting him on fire. Al-Kinani was executed in 2023. But many of the executions documented by human rights groups are unrelated to violent crimes. Instead, activists say, they target low-level smugglers in cases that are marred by coerced confessions and other issues.

“When we appeared in court, there was no lawyer for us; no one stood on our side,” Hassen Jemal Abdala, an Ethiopian man on death row, said in a phone call in June to activists abroad that was recorded and shared with the Times. “We don’t know the language or the country’s law.”

The Saudi government did not respond to a request for comment on his case. The letter from UN special rapporteurs noted that in court documents they had reviewed for five men facing the death penalty, only one had a court-appointed lawyer, and the other four did not appear to have legal representation.

In the recording, Hassen, 35, said he had entered Saudi Arabia as a migrant without legal permission, hoping to find a job, but was arrested at the border. In early August, he was executed after being accused of smuggling drugs, according to Eskinder Gedlu, an Ethiopian activist in Washington who has organised protests and vigils for Hassen and others facing the death penalty in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government has not published an execution notice for someone by that name but announced in August that an Ethiopian citizen had been executed for smuggling hashish. It is unclear if that was the same man; Eskinder said he believed it was.

Dozens of East African men accused of smuggling have been executed since January, according to Amnesty International. “It’s like they are being dragged to the slaughterhouse and no one cares,” Eskinder said.

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