Saudi blogger gets 50 public lashes
Raif Badawi has been sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for questioning the ban on his website
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — A witness says a Saudi blogger convicted of insulting Islam has been flogged 50 times in the Red Sea city of Jiddah as authorities started carrying out his sentence, which includes 1,000 lashes.
The witness says Raif Badawi was flogged after Friday prayers outside a mosque. His feet and hands were bound but his face was visible. He remained silent during the lashings.
The witness spoke on condition of anonymity fearing government reprisal.
Badawi was sentenced last May to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes. He had criticized Saudi Arabia’s powerful clerics on a liberal blog he founded.
Amnesty International said Badawi would receive 50 lashes once a week for 20 weeks.
Saudi Arabia’s close ally, the United States, called on authorities to cancel the punishment.
“We are greatly concerned about reports that human rights activist Raif Badawi will start facing the inhumane punishment of 1,000 lashes in addition to serving a 10-year sentence in prison for exercising his rights to freedom of expression and religion,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Thursday.
She said the US was calling on “Saudi authorities to cancel this brutal punishment” and to review his case.
Badawi’s wife, Ensaf Haidar, fled to Canada with their three children and has been updating Reporters Without Borders about her husband’s plight.
“Although Saudi Arabia condemned yesterday’s cowardly attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, it is now preparing to inflict the most barbaric punishment on a citizen who just used his freedom of expression and information, the same freedom that cost the French journalists their lives,” Reporters Without Borders program director Lucie Morillon said.
Some 14,000 people have signed an online petition calling on Saudi’s King Abdullah to pardon Badawi and stop what the watchdog called “a medieval form of torture.”
On Thursday, Saudi Arabia beheaded a Pakistani man convicted of drug smuggling and a Saudi for murder, the Interior Ministry said.
Their executions bring to six the number of people beheaded since the start of January in the conservative Muslim kingdom.
Awida Utaibi was executed after a court found him guilty of murdering a relative, the ministry said in a statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency. Mohammad Shahbal of Pakistan was beheaded for smuggling heroin into the country. The drugs were found in capsules he had swallowed.
Rape, murder, apostasy, armed robbery and drug trafficking are punishable by death in Saudi Arabia.
Last year, Saudi Arabia executed 87 people, compared with 78 in 2013, according to an AFP tally.