Death Penalty News

KUWAIT CITY, Nov 26: Divorce rates in Kuwait are rising, with recent statistics indicating that addiction—particularly among wives—has become a significant contributing factor. In response, authorities are preparing to introduce surprise premarital drug testing as part of a broader set of reforms under Kuwait’s new drug law. The countdown has officially begun for the enforcement of this new legislation, which was drafted by a judicial committee formed by the First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Interior, Sheikh Fahd Al-Yousef. The committee is headed by Counselor Mohammed Rashid Al-Duaij.

Aroosa Khan's son was chatting on WhatsApp but suddenly found himself the target of "vigilante" investigators who accused him of having committed blasphemy online, a crime that carries the death penalty in Pakistan. The 27-year-old is one in hundreds of young men standing trial in Pakistan courts accused of making blasphemous statements online or in WhatsApp groups, an offence for which arrests have exploded in recent years. Many of the cases are being brought to trial by private "vigilante groups" led by lawyers and supported by volunteers who scour the internet for offenders, rights groups and police say.

According to the judges, Shagufta Kiran shared an offensive message against Islam on WhatsApp. The woman, currently imprisoned in Rawalpindi, was sentenced to death at the end of a three-year trial. Shagufta Kiran, a 40-year-old Pakistani Christian woman, has been found guilty of blasphemy and sentenced to death under Article 295-C of Pakistan’s Penal Code, which punishes offences against the Prophet Muhammad.

A court in Pakistan has sentenced a 22-year-old student to death on charges of blasphemy over Whatsapp messages. The court in Punjab Province said he had shared blasphemous pictures and videos with the intention to outrage the religious feelings of Muslims. A 17-year-old was sentenced to life imprisonment as part of the same case. Both have denied wrongdoing.

It may have started as a row with another stallholder in the market or perhaps with a remark to a beggar. But while the beginning is unclear, how the day’s events unfolded and its tragic denouement have become all too familiar in northern Nigeria – not least because the mob that murdered Usman Buda filmed him being stoned to death . Buda, a butcher and father of six, was the latest person to be lynched for ‘blaspheming’ in Sokoto, one of 12 among Nigeria’s 36 states to adopt sharia law in 2000. The Associated Press reported that it began as an argument with another trader. The accusation of blasphemy – whether true or not – quickly led to ‘a large crowd that included children pelting stones at Buda on the floor as they cursed him’.

As he tried to restart his stalled car, the young military doctor would have heard the speech being delivered to the Muslim Railway Employees Association near Quetta railway station. Followers of the Ahmadi faith, a frenzied cleric was proclaiming, were blasphemers and heretics, who ought to be punished by death. Then, someone in the crowd noticed that Major Mahmood Ahmad had a short beard. The doctor’s body was found later, his one lung cut through and his guts carved out of his body. Like so many thousands after it, the murder on 11 August 1948—Pakistan’s very first blasphemy killing—remained unidentified and the case was filed untraced. There was, judges Muhammad Munir and MR Kayani acidly recorded in an official inquiry, no one “willing to take credit for this act of Islamic heroism and out of a large number of persons who were eyewitnesses, none was able or willing to identify the ghazis who were authors of this brave deed.”

An anti-terrorism court here on Friday convicted a man on the charges of committing blasphemy and other religion-related offences on social media and sentenced him to death and imprisonment on multiple counts. A total Rs1.2 million fine was also imposed on the convict. The judge declared in the verdict that the prosecution had “fully” proved its case against the accused, a resident of Mardan, and that the evidence available on record connected him with the commission of the offences. As the matter was sensitive, the accused was tried inside the Peshawar Central Prison, where he had been kept since his arrest in the year 2021.

JERUSALEM (AP) — The severed head and decapitated torso of a 25-year-old Palestinian were discovered on the side of a road in the occupied West Bank, police said Friday, confirming gruesome details of a killing that shocked Palestinian society. But accounts that the victim, Ahmad Abu Murkhiyeh, was a gay man who feared persecution for his sexuality and had sought asylum in Israel two years ago turned the terrible crime into a socially and politically explosive case. It was unclear how Abu Murkhiyeh wound up in Hebron, the conservative West Bank city that he had reportedly fled. Palestinian police officials told The Associated Press on Friday that Abu Murkhiyeh’s head and torso were found near his family’s house. Col. Loay Irzekat, a police spokesman, said authorities arrested a Palestinian acquaintance of Abu Murkhiyeh as a suspect in the killing, but declined to ascribe a motive or elaborate on their relationship pending the investigation. Palestinian social media was gripped by the g...

Muslim students in northwest Nigerian city of Sokoto on Thursday stoned a Christian student to death and burnt her corpse after accusing her of blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad, police said. Dozens of Muslim students of Shehu Shagari College of Education went on rampage after fellow student Deborah Samuel made a statement on social media which they considered offensive against the Prophet Muhammad, Sanusi Abubakar, a Sokoto police spokesman said in a statement. The ‘students forcefully removed the victim from the security room where she was hidden by the school authorities, killed her and burnt the building’, Abubakar said. He said that the students ‘banded together with miscreants’ and blocked the highway outside the school before police teams dispersed them. Abubakar said that two suspects had been arrested over the incident. Sokoto is among a dozen northern states where the strict Islamic legal system or Sharia is in operation. State information commissioner Isah Bajini Galada...

A 26-year-old Muslim woman in Pakistan was reportedly sentenced to death on Wednesday for sending a blasphemous text message and caricature of Prophet Muhammad on Whatsapp. According to reports, a woman named Aneeqa Ateeq was arrested in May 2020. She was charged with posting “blasphemous material” as her WhatsApp status.  The court noted that a friend asked Ateeq to change the status but she forwarded it to it him instead. Aneeqa Ateeq Gets Death Penalty Caricatures of Muhammed are forbidden by Islam and blasphemy is a hugely sensitive issue in Muslim-majority nation Pakistan.  There are strict laws prohibiting such acts and it can carry a potential death sentence. The sentence against Ateeq was announced by a court in the garrison city of Rawalpindi.  The court ordered her to be “hanged by her neck till she is dead”. She was also given a 20-year jail sentence. As per reports, more than 80 people have been jailed in Pakistan on charges of blasphemy.  The US Commissi...

Pair were part of a WhatsApp drugs ring that was supplied by overseas criminals Two men in Abu Dhabi have been sentenced to death for drugs offences. Abu Dhabi Judicial Department said the Filipinos were guilty of possessing and dealing narcotics and psychotropic substances. The Criminal Court of Abu Dhabi heard how the men were paid to deal drugs on behalf of overseas criminals. It was these criminals who gave the two Filipinos the location of isolated spots where they could collect the drugs. The drugs were then sorted, divided and packaged for distribution.  Pictures of the drugs and their co-ordinates were then forwarded by dealers to customers on WhatsApp. Following a police investigation, the case was referred to Abu Dhabi Public Prosecution and a warrant was issued for the arrest of the suspects and a search of their homes. Police found a suspicious crystalline substance in their residences that, following analysis, turned out to be a prohibited psychotropic substance. ...

US Republican politicians shared a video of a man hanging from a fixed line below a helicopter in Afghanistan, claiming it shows the Taliban executing him. This is false; footage shows he was affixed by a body harness, not a ligature around his neck, and journalists say he is a Taliban member who was attempting to attach the group's flag to a pole. "This horrifying image encapsulates Joe Biden's Afghanistan catastrophe: The Taliban hanging a man from an American Blackhawk helicopter," Senator Ted Cruz wrote on Twitter on August 30, 2021 above a tweet featuring a 12-second video of the scene. Representative Dan Crenshaw also spread the video on Twitter, while conservative pastor Greg Locke made the claim without including the footage. Many Facebook and Instagram users also posted stills from the clip. While the video is authentic, it is being misrepresented. Despite the low quality of the clip that is circulating online, it is possible to see that the man is hangi...

At least 21 drug offenders have been handed the death penalty via video calls on WhatsApp or Zoom during the pandemic. Courts in Indonesia and Singapore are using video calls to sentence to death people convicted of drug trafficking, according to drug harm reduction experts. Harm Reduction International (HRI), which published its annual report into global drug war death penalties on Wednesday, told VICE World News that 19 drug offenders were sentenced to death in Indonesia during virtual hearings held on video apps such as Zoom and WhatsApp between March 2020 and March this year. 2 people convicted of drug trafficking were handed death sentences over Zoom calls in Singapore last year. The report said use of video calls for trial hearings and to administer death sentences introduced due to COVID-19 constituted a “significant violation of their fair trial rights”. Lawyers for defendants said the video conference calls, which featured defendants speaking from prison, were often prone to i...

The governor of Kano State, Abdullahi Ganduje, has vowed to sign the death warrant for the execution of a man convicted of blasphemy in the state . Mr Ganduje said he will only fail to do so if the man appeals up to the Supreme Court and wins. “I will not waste time in signing the warrant for the execution of the man who blasphemed our holy prophet of Islam,” the governor said Thursday during a meeting with clerics in Kano. The Kano Upper Shari’a Court in Kano on August 10 sentenced Yahaya Sharif, a musician, to death for “blasphemy”. The judge, Aliyu Kani, said the 22-year-old should die by hanging. Mr Sharif, a resident of Sharifai in Kano metropolis, was accused of committing the offence in a song he circulated via WhatsApp in March 2020. In response, protesters in the highly conservative state torched the singer’s family home. Many Nigerians, and rights groups, have criticised the ruling. Amnesty International urged the court to reverse its verdict. ...

Malaysian woman sentenced to death in Vietnam for transporting drugs A Vietnamese court today sentenced a Malaysian woman to death for transporting 3.3kg of cocaine from Brazil to Vietnam. Kalaivani G Muniandy was found guilty of “illegal transporting of narcotic substances”, a Vietnamese daily reported. The woman, aged 40, was nabbed in October 2018 when she landed in Ho Chi Minh City on an Emirates flight from Dubai. Customs officials at the Tan Son Nhat Airport found 3.3kg of cocaine hidden in food boxes in her suitcase. “Kalaivani said when she worked as a security guard at an airport warehouse here, an Indian man gave her the phone number of a man called Prakash, who specialised in labour export and drug trafficking,” according to the VnExpress International report. She and Prakash, whose nationality was undisclosed, made contact on WhatsApp. Kalaivani said Prakash had asked her to be a “liaison” for his counterparts in foreign countries and transport ...