New king Salman of Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia on Monday executed a man convicted of raping several girls in a case that has captured the kingdom's attention and marks the first beheading carried out under the newly enthroned King Salman.
The Interior Ministry said Moussa al-Zahrani was executed in the city of Jiddah. The ministry statement, carried by the official Saudi Press Agency, said al-Zahrani was convicted of luring underage girls, intoxicating them, forcing them to watch pornographic videos and then physically and sexually assaulting them.His alleged victims were children assaulted in 2011 in a string of attacks in Jiddah.
The case has caused a stir on social media — which is unusual in Saudi Arabia for cases of violent crimes — in part because al-Zahrani claimed his innocence throughout the trial and two later appeals.
Last year, al-Zahrani appealed in a 20-minute video for Saudi King Abdullah, who died on Friday, to intervene. In the widely-viewed video, the 45-year-old Arabic teacher claimed he was framed by police and that a man — a neighbor of 10 years — who accused him of molesting his daughter was also a police investigator in the case.
An Arabic hashtag on Twitter, "We are all Moussa al-Zahrani" garnered thousands of comments by Saudis with conflicting opinions over the case.
Al-Zahrani's relatives appeared on Saudi talk shows, saying the case was riddled with inconsistencies and that the judiciary did not weigh all the evidence. They claimed a medical report found the investigator's 10 year-old daughter had not been assaulted and that several cases of assault against young girls took place in Jiddah while al-Zahrani was already jailed.His brother, Hassan al-Zahrani said after the execution that his brother, a father of six, could not have committed the crimes he was convicted of.
Saudi Arabia, which has one of the highest execution rates in the world, follows a strict interpretation of Islamic law and applies the death penalty for crimes such as murder, rape and witchcraft.
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