Number of prisoners being executed has accelerated this year under King Salman amid activists’ concerns that trials are not being conducted fairly

Three more people have been put to death in Saudi Arabia, taking the number of executions carried out in the country this year to 88 – surpassing the total for all of 2014.

The interior ministry on Tuesday identified the latest prisoners to be put to death as Saudis Awad al-Rowaili and Lafi al-Shammary, who had been convicted of smuggling amphetamines. They were executed in the northern region of Jawf, the ministry said in statements carried by the official Saudi Press Agency.

Another Saudi, Muhammad al-Shihri, was separately put to death in the south-western region of Asir for murder.

The escalation in the number of executions comes amid activists’ concerns that trials are not being conducted fairly. The conservative Islamic kingdom executed 87 people in 2014, according to an AFP tally.

Those beheaded this year include Siti Zainab, an Indonesian domestic worker convicted of murder despite concerns about her mental health. Jakarta summoned Riyadh’s ambassador over her case; a rare diplomatic incident linked to Saudi Arabia’s executions, around half of which involve foreigners.

Also among this year’s dead are at least eight Yemenis, 10 Pakistanis, Syrians, Jordanians, and individuals from Burma, the Philippines, India, Chad, Eritrea and Sudan.

In 2014 Saudi Arabia ranked in the top five countries worldwide for the number of executions, according to Amnesty International. Amnesty said in a report that court proceedings in the country fell “far short” of global norms of fairness, while trials in death penalty cases were often held in secret. It said defendants were rarely allowed formal representation by lawyers and might be convicted solely on the basis of confessions.

Under the Gulf nation’s strict version of sharia law, drug trafficking, rape, murder, apostasy and armed robbery are all punishable by death. Executions are carried out in public, mostly by beheading with a sword.

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A surge in executions began towards the end of the reign of King Abdullah, who died in January. The numbers have accelerated this year under his successor, King Salman, in what Amnesty has called an unprecedented “macabre spike”. With the number of beheadings soaring, the civil service this month advertised for eight new “executors of retribution”.

Activists have been unable to explain specific reasons for the surge, and officials have not commented. However, drug and murder convictions account for the bulk of executions in Saudi Arabia and Ali Adubisi, director of the Berlin-based European Saudi Organisation for Human Rights, said poverty could be leading to a rise in drug crimes.

The number of executions will rise even higher if death sentences are carried out against nine people who activists say were convicted after demonstrations that began in 2011 by the minority Shia community. Among them is cleric Nimr al-Nimr, a driving force behind the protests.

