Saudi beheads Indonesian woman convicted of murder

JEDDAH—An Indonesian woman was beheaded by the sword on Saturday after being convicted of murdering a Saudi woman, the interior ministry said.

The woman named Roiaiti Beth Sabotti Sarona, according to a transliteration from Arabic, was found guilty of killing Saudi Khairiya bint Hamid Mijlid by striking her repeatedly on the head with a meat chopper and stabbing her in the neck, the ministry said in a statement carried by the official SPA news agency.

The ministry did not elaborate on the motives of the crime, nor it did disclose the relation between the two women. But Indonesian officials say that around 70 percent of the 1.2 million Indonesians working in Saudi Arabia are domestic staff.

The beheading in the western province of Mecca brings the number of executions in the ultra-conservative kingdom this year to 28, according to an Agence France-Presse tally based on official and human rights group reports.

London-based watchdog Amnesty International called on Saudi Arabia last week to stop applying the death penalty, saying there had been a significant rise in the number of executions carried out over the past six weeks.

It said at least 27 people have been executed in Saudi Arabia in 2011, “the same as the total number of people executed in the whole of 2010. Fifteen people were executed in May alone.”

In 2009, the number of executions reached 67, compared to 102 in 2008.

Rape, murder, apostasy, armed robbery and drug trafficking are all punishable by death under Saudi Arabia’s strict interpretation of Islamic sharia law.