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Wadah Refat and Mohamed Khaled were marched at gunpoint through a baying mob of bloodthirsty spectators who gathered to watch the grizzly spectacle in the port city of Aden. Horrifying images from the scene show the men lying face down before being shot dead by a firing squad. Refat, 28, and Khaled, 31, were sentenced to death for abducting, raping and murdering the boy.

Their trial was told the perverts' young victim was playing outside the house of one of the men who dragged him inside and carried out their sickening attack.

When sentencing the pair, a judge said: “After the rape, they could not silence the cries of the child who begged for help, one of them grabbed a knife and cracked his neck.”

Death sentences in Yemen are are usually carried out by firing squad though stoning, hanging and beheading are permitted under the country’s penal code. Executions are not always held in public.

Human Rights Watch director Sarah Leah Whitson condemned the execution.

She said: “Public execution is an even more grotesque violation of human rights, particularly in a country where the ability of the accused to obtain adequate legal representation and the coverage of the process is highly limited.”