Saudi woman executed for witchcraft

boomsauce

DUBAI (Reuters) - Rights group Amnesty International has described as "deeply shocking" Saudi Arabia's beheading of a woman convicted on charges of "sorcery and witchcraft," saying it underlined the urgent need to end executions in the kingdom.

Saudi national Amina bint Abdul Halim bin Salem Nasser was executed on Monday in the northern province of al-Jawf after being tried and convicted for practicing sorcery, the interior ministry said, without giving details of the charges.

"The citizen... practiced acts of witchcraft and sorcery," Saudi newspaper al-Watan cited the interior ministry as saying. "The death sentence was carried out on the accused yesterday (Monday) in the Qurayyat district in al-Jawf region."

Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy, has no written criminal code, which is instead based on an uncodified form of Islamic sharia law as interpreted by the country's judges.

"While we don't know the details of the acts which the authorities accused Amina of committing, the charge of sorcery has often been used in Saudi Arabia to punish people, generally after unfair trials, for exercising their right to freedom of speech or religion," Philip Luther, interim director of Amnesty's Middle East and North Africa program, said in a statement.

Amnesty said the execution was the second of its kind in recent months. A Sudanese national was beheaded in the Saudi city of Medina in September after being convicted on sorcery charges, according to the London-based group.

why do all of God's people always wanting to kill others?

this is ridiculous. thought the witch trials were over???

Don't worry, the USA hates seeing countries treat their people badly and will swoop in to spread democracy!

Witchcraft really boils down to 'thoughtcrime' - much the same way unfortunately that much of the western world operates as regards Political Correctness, hatespeech etc.

Originally posted by TinkerHaus
Don't worry, the USA hates seeing countries treat their people badly and will swoop in to spread democracy!

Not that the thought that a country where people believe in witchcraft and sorcery might obtain nuclear weapons is a comforting one, either.

See, this is what I don't understand. We're wasting our time on "terrorist" who're an apparent threat to our countries, yet I hear stories like this, and think, there's places out there that need much more help than the time/resources we waste in these stupid wars.

For Example, I read the other day on BBC: www.bbc.co.uk...

The "rape capital" of the world, and by the sounds of it, the people in these kinda places are in the worst kind of conditions, caught between violent political troubles, and people are slaughtered like animals mindlessly, either side they pick. These witches incidents are huge in Africa as well, people are burned alive, and I can't begin to imagine what that's like.

We need to do more to bring these impoverished countries more aid, so that they not just left to, more or less, die. We can be doing more for these people, in Africa and the Middle East, and it's incidents like this that prove so. Innocent people are the people suffering, and it's a damn shame.

Originally posted by vanhippi
See, this is what I don't understand. We're wasting our time on "terrorist" who're an apparent threat to our countries, yet I hear stories like this, and think, there's places out there that need much more help than the time/resources we waste in these stupid wars.

The motivation and reasoning is the same, religious insanity. And those people ARE dangerous because they act irrational, whether they acquire weapons to kill all "infidels" or kill women for "witchcraft". It's one and the same delusion.