SAUDI ARABIA: A barber spared beheading

The king spared the barber.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has rescinded the death penalty against a Turkish barber convicted of “cursing” the name of God.

Sabri Bogday, who cuts hair in the port of Jidda, was sentenced to beheading for swearing during an argument with his neighbor, a tailor.

Turkish media reported  that Turkey’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia informed Bogday’s family that he had been spared.

Turkish President Abdullah Gul had asked the king to set aside the verdict.

After Bogday's arrest, the Arab News in Saudi Arabia quoted a lawyer who described how the court viewed using God's name in vain: 

“Some judges consider it heresy and infidelity, and say that the accused cannot repent and so faces the death penalty. Others consider the statement to be disbelief, thus allow the accused to retract what he has said and repent and then set him free. ... Sentences in these cases are limited and considered rare, because the judgment is not based on something that is written.”

Saudi Arabia’s rigid Islamic laws carry the death penalty for crimes including murder, rape, drug trafficking, heresy and blasphemy.

A recent report by Amnesty International estimated that 71 people had been executed in the kingdom during the first eight months of 2008. More than half were foreigners. 

-- Jeffrey Fleishman in Cairo

Photo: King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Credit: AFP/Getty Images

P.S. Get news from the Middle East in your mailbox every day. The Los Angeles Times distributes a free daily newsletter with the latest headlines from the Middle East, including the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. You can subscribe by logging in at the website here, clicking on the box for "L.A. Times updates" and then clicking on the "World: Mideast" box.

Comments

[Mark]

I tell you this is the most dengerous rulers in the World,they are all stinking filthy no mads and they keep cutting heads in the name of God, and the mean time they wrap their women into dark sheets or white sheets and they travel to orher countries and most prestigious hotel inculding las Vegas, and their Yatcht s in the sea ,and get into Orgies with Hookers and gay man
and they sell the moral to their own people

hypocrats and backword minded rulers and we are in the USA keep supporting this nomads for their oil

they need to be changed and forced to be democratic,

king ???they are not a king. they are mindless people

kings did not disgraced themsleves like this people do

[wayne]

Bushes hand holding buddy.
Saudi far more repressive than Saddam's Iraq
Funny the same people from Saudi go to Europe and America carouse and brake Islamic law then return home princes.

Saudi now one of our biggest customer of military hardware from the US. Good for the economy?

[Karlito]

Not a bad idea, especially if we greatly reduce the appeals process. This would reduce a lot of the money we waste on prisons.

[Art]

This proves how backward this people are. Just makes you sick. You could be put to death just for saying something few other religious freaks don't like. I hope someone finds new energy source very soon, so we can stop buying oil from this barbarians that are trapped in time.

[pitbullstew]

if that were the way we ran things in america 99% of the population would be dead by now, and as for proposition *?