A Nigerian man, Fahd Houssawi, has been executed in Saudi Arabia after being found guilty of murdering a police officer.
This brings the number of executions in the ultra-conservative Islamic kingdom to 95 for the year, drawing condemnations from human rights groups the world over, Guardian reports.
According to a statement by the country’s interior ministry, Houssawi was executed on Sunday in the western city of Taif after he’d been found guilty of strangling a policeman and beating him to death.
Crimes such as murder, drug trafficking, armed robbery, rape and apostasy carry the death sentence in the oil-rich kingdom, leading Amnesty International to warn that at the current rate Saudi Arabia could see more than 100 executions in the first half of 2016.
The kingdom reportedly carried out approximately 158 death sentences last year, making it the third most prolific executioner after Iran and Pakistan, and more worrying is the fact that the executions this year are higher than at the same point last year.
The commonest offences leading to executions are murder and drug trafficking cases, although sectional battles led to the murder of 47 people on a single day in January under the blanket charge of “terrorism offences”.
It is yet unknown what impact the execution will have on diplomatic relations between the two countries, as Nigeria President Muhammadu Buhari in March announced that the country has joined the Saudi-led Islamic Coalition Against Terror.
