Tue 30 Oct 2007
Saudi Arabia executes 3 Bangladeshis
Agence France-Presse . Riyadh
Three Bangladeshis were beheaded in Saudi Arabia on Friday after being convicted of robbery and sexual assault, the interior ministry said. Thakeer Abdul Rahman, Tafeel Abdul Rasheed and Nayoon Jowley were executed in the kingdom’s capital city Riyadh for breaking into the home of a fellow Bangladeshi, robbing him at knifepoint and sexually assaulting his wife, the ministry said in a statement carried by the official SPA news agency.
Many questions come to my mind,
1. Did they really do the crime? There have been many allegation that local Saudi’s crimes are usually covered by scapegoating poor illiterate foreign workers.
2. Did they get a lawyer to represent them? Was there any appeal process?
3. Did Saudi Government bother to notify the family of those convicted or at least Bangladesh government? Isn’t it a diplomatic norm to notify the country whose citizen are being executed?
4. Where was Bangladesh embassy? Did they know of the case? What did they do to legally represent them?
5. Howcome no Bangladeshi media knew of it until after they were beheaded?
6. The three names sound too strange to be Bangladeshi names. Waht is going on?
7. How these three poor souls felt while waiting death in a solitary chamber in a Saudi jail? Could they communicate as Saudi criminal system runs in arabic only? Did they long for their long left green village, the little river while awaiting death? Did they get some rice and daal during the weeks awaiting death?
8 Did any Saudi cheer in joy when these three were lined up in a public square in Riyadh and being slaughtered?
[Stop the Barbarism. Say No To death penalty]
[Originally posted at rumiahmed.wordpress.com ]
October 30th, 2007 at 6:52 pm
Bangladesh government need to clarify what did thay know and what did they do about it.
October 30th, 2007 at 9:11 pm
Sometimes i need reminding that this is a human dignity portal. This is one of those reminders.
Rumi,
Saying no to death penalty is not really going to go anywhere to getting better legal services for the foreign workers of KSA.
Your first question is equally applicable in our good nation.
I want to know about what happened as well as the fairness and intelligability of the trial issue too, I have no expectations of the BD government in this regard due to the KL fiasco.
Also the ‘victim of the gang rape and robbery’ should be given importance. Were they given the compensation option? When you eventually find their names out will you go all human-rightsy on them?
a)
Who knows islamic law, saudi legal institutions, social conditions, has esteem there, gives a stuff about non-professional workers and has the space to move in that arena?
Maybe post an add for a saudi friendly, criminal lawyer version of Dr Kamal?
b)
My other question is whether and when they were returned home for burial. At such a late stage, perhaps the only thing to do is to go to the janaza and work on question a.
Names issue,
Maybe they got Arabicised then Anglicised.
Marhum Nayoon looks like his name was Noyon.
Marhum Thakeer might have been Shakir.
Marhum Tafeel might have been Tufail.
Alternatively they might just have been brown and poor, hence ‘Bangladeshi’.
And remember that not all bangladeshis find themselves adorned with the name of the great mevlana.
From what I read in the gulf press, relating to BD issues, there are journalists of a similar political striping to you folks (descriptive, dont take it otherwise) in the gulf are writing about political things. Evidence for this is that weird stories that only deshis would care about appear there. They arent always faceless AFP feeds.
October 31st, 2007 at 6:25 pm
3 Bangladeshi men beheaded in Saudi Arabia
Front page / World
10/26/2007 14:15 Source: AP ©
Three Bangladeshi men convicted of killing a fellow national and raping his wife were beheaded.
In a statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency, the ministry said that Thakeer Abdul-Rahman, Tafeel Abdul-Rasheed and Leon Juli stormed the home of the fellow national, whose name was not given.
beheaded criminals(ancapistan.typepad.com)
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“They beat him up, threatened him with a knife, blindfolded him and used a rope to strangle him,” according to the statement.
It said the three men stole the couple’s money and gold jewelry before taking the wife to a remote place and raping her.
The men were executed in the capital Riyadh, the statement added.
Saudi Arabia follows a strict interpretation of Islam under which those convicted of murder, drug trafficking, rape and armed robbery are executed in public with a sword.
October 31st, 2007 at 6:30 pm
when you are in their country you have to obey their laws. So there is nothing new here. Its no news that BD Embassies are renown for their incompetencies. They are usually staffed by politically aligned fat-cats.
And considering it was a fellow Bangladeshi they were robbing maybe we should respect Saudi Arabia a bit more for taking action for a fellow Bangladeshi.
November 1st, 2007 at 12:15 pm
Rumi Bhai,
While the questions you pose are relevant and guilt should definitely have been corroborated through due process, I’m not sure that I have much sympathy for these “poor souls” in solitary confinement if they did indeed sexually assault a woman.
November 2nd, 2007 at 11:29 pm
“They are usually staffed by politically aligned fat-cats”
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. The foreign service is staffed by professional civil servants. The political appointees of the 70s and 80s have finally retired, and I repeat: it is now a service of professionals, smarter and better educated than almost all other branches of the government.
Does the fact that embassy officials haven’t intervened mean that they are incompetent? No, because it isn’t possible for a country as unimportant as Bangladesh to meddle in the judicial system of another country, no matter how wrongheaded or unfair it may be.
Apart from that, I agree with you Iqbal. There seems to be an implicit assumption that the men are innocent. If they really did sexually assault the woman, they got what they had coming.
November 10th, 2007 at 12:33 am
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