Saudi Arabia Tuesday beheaded 37 Saudi citizens – most of them minority Shiites – in a mass execution across the kingdom for alleged terrorism-related crimes, marking the largest execution since 2016.
It also publicly pinned the executed body and severed head of a convicted Sunni extremist to a pole as a warning to others, AP reported.
Saudi dissident Ali Al-Ahmed, who runs the Gulf Institute in Washington, identified 34 of those executed as Shiites based on the names announced by the Interior Ministry.
Amnesty International also confirmed the majority of those executed were Shiite men. The rights group said they were convicted “after sham trials” that relied on confessions extracted through torture, according to AP.
It comes as the largest number of executions in a single day in Saudi Arabia since Jan. 2, 2016, when the kingdom executed 47 people for terrorism-related crimes in what was the largest mass execution carried out by Saudi authorities since 1980.
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