Executions fuel Saudi fury over pardon

Executions fuel Saudi fury over pardon
By John R Bradley in Jeddah
11 August 2003

The public beheading of an Afghan and a Pakistani yesterday for drug smuggling has exacerbated the anger among ordinary Saudis at the royal pardon given last week to five Britons and a Canadian found guilty of alcohol smuggling and a string of bombings.

--snip--

"If you compare the crimes of these two poor drug smugglers to what the Saudi media has been saying for years the Britons and Canadian did, their execution is disgraceful," said Fatima, a Saudi woman in her 20s, outside the mosque where one of the smugglers had been executed hours earlier.

"Why should the Westerners go free when these drug smugglers from the Third World get their heads cut off? Everyone I know is furious," she said. "And if {the Westerners} didn't do it, what does that say about our judicial system?"

--snip--

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=432528

obvious what the Saudi client gov't's priorities are..

Do they have a problem with Brit and US being against drugs at home, cutting off heads via client govs in Pak and Afghanistan, and then demanding pardons for CIA and MI6 folks with drugs in Saudi Arabia?

Not a very flexible understanding of the GOP/Bush empire.

if I was them I'd be careful what I wished for, the only people who get the good ole sharia treatment to show how devout the Arab Facade in Riyadh is are the guest workers.