JEDDAH: Saudi Arabia on Sunday executed three Pakistani nationals convicted of smuggling heroin, bringing the number of executions in the kingdom to 26 this year.
The state-run SPA news agency said the three had been found guilty of “smuggling quantities of heroin in their stomachs”. It named the three men as Mohammed Ashraf Shafi Mohammed, Mohammed Aref Mohammed Anayt and Mohammed Afdal Asghar Ali. All three are Pakistani citizens.
SPA reported 153 people being executed in the ultra-conservative kingdom last year, a number confirmed by London-based rights group Amnesty International.
Amnesty reported 158 death penalties in the country for 2015, the highest annual rate in the past two decades. Saudi Arabia has a strict Islamic legal code under which murder, drug trafficking, armed robbery, rape and apostasy are all punishable by death.
