US urges Saudi to cancel whipping of citizen journalist
Blogger and activist sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for questioning the ban of his website
The United States Thursday appealed to Saudi Arabia to annul a sentence of 1,000 lashes imposed on a Saudi rights activist and citizen journalist on top of a 10-year jail term.
Raef Badawi, 30, was sentenced on November 5 after questioning the Gulf kingdom’s direction on the now-banned Liberal Saudi Network, which he set up.
Press freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders said Badawi was Friday due to start 20 weekly whipping sessions of 50 lashes each.
“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.
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.