Countries that use the death penalty have a wide range of options available to them, but very few use the same method

Abdulkareem al-Hawaj was just 16 when he was arrested for taking part in anti-government protests in Saudi Arabia.

Five years later and his head has been chopped off in public — along with 36 others in one day — by a swordsman on the payroll of the same government he dared to criticise all those years ago.

Perhaps the only consolation for his grieving family is that his headless body was not publicly pinned to a pole for several hours as a warning to others — a fate that befell one of the executed prisoners, Khaled bin Abdel Karim al-Tuwaijri.

The conservative Islamic kingdom say all of those executed had adopted extremist ideologies and formed terrorist cells with the aim of spreading chaos and provoking sectarian strife.

37 PEOPLE BEHEADED

Human rights groups have hit out at the most recent brutal wave of punishment, revealed by the Saudis on Wednesday, in which 37 people killed.

It’s thought the majority were beheaded in public and at least one was crucified.

The body of a man was pinned up in public and the severed head of a victim was hoisted to a pole as a grisly warning to others.

Critics say the majority of those executed were convicted after sham trials that violated international standards and relied on confessions extracted through torture.

They also say the grisly and public punishments are being used as tools to crush

pro-democracy campaigners, human rights activists, intellectuals and the Sunni Muslim kingdom’s Shi’a minority — to which at least 33 of those executed belonged to.

“(The) mass executions are a chilling demonstration of the Saudi Arabian authorities’ callous disregard for human life. It is also yet another gruesome indication of how the death penalty is being used as a political tool to crush dissent from within the country’s Shia minority,” said Lynn Maalouf, Amnesty International’s Middle East research director.

In a statement, she said 11 of the men were convicted of spying for Iran and sentenced to death after a “grossly unfair trial”.

They had been locked up for more than two years before their trial began, and some of their lawyers boycotted the case after they were denied access to their clients and the case files.

At least 14 others executed were convicted of violent offences related to their participation in anti-government demonstrations in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province between 2011 and 2012, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Their trial began in 2015, but HRW says some of the men were convicted based on confessions they later withdrew in court because they had been tortured.

“As a matter of principle, none of these people had lawyers during investigation, so all of these cases are unfair,” Adam Coogle, who monitors Saudi Arabia for HRH, told the New York Times.

However, in a statement, the state-run Saudi Press Agency said the prisoners were found guilty of attacking security installations with explosives, killing a number of security officers and co-operating with enemy organisations against the interests of the country.

The Islamic kingdom has one of the highest execution rates in the world, and yesterday’s mass beheadings bring the number of such punishments this year to 106.

At least 44 of those are foreign nationals, many of whom were convicted of drug-related crimes, however the majority are understood to be political prisoners who have been convicted as part of a brutal crackdown.

The crackdown began with the arrival of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2015 — which led to the torture of activists, businessmen, princes and women’s rights defenders.

Shortly after the young prince rose to power, 43 people were beheaded and another four people were killed by firing squad in January 2016.

One of those was popular Shi’a cleric Nimr al-Nimr — whose execution inflamed tensions across the Middle East.

Iran’s Shi’a population retaliated by setting fire to the Saudi Arabia embassy in Tehran. In response, the Saudi ruling family cut off diplomatic ties with the country as relations between the two Middle Eastern powers hit a fresh low.

Since then, the crackdown on dissent has continued to intensify despite wave after wave of international condemnation — with the kingdom executing 149 people in 2018.

The Saudi Government does not release official statistics on the number of executions it carries out, however the death toll is being monitored by human rights organisations.

After this week’s mass beheadings, human rights organisations are trying to save Shi’a prisoners on death row who are at imminent risk of execution — some of whom were below the age of 18 when they were arrested.

“The use of the death penalty is always appalling, but it is even more shocking when it is applied after unfair trials or against people who were under 18 at the time of the crime in flagrant violation of international law,” said Ms Maalouf.

“Instead of stepping up executions at an alarming rate in the name of countering terrorism, Saudi Arabia’s must halt this bloody execution spree immediately and establish an official moratorium on executions as a first step towards abolishing the death penalty completely.”