Mujtaba al-Sweikat

SAUDI ARABIA: ON ANNIVERSARY OF MASS EXECUTION, FAMILIES PLEAD FOR RETURN OF THEIR LOVED ONES' REMAINS

May 3, 2020:

It has been exactly one year since 37 people were executed on a single day in Saudi Arabia, and none of the bodies are known to have been returned to their families, according to human rights activists, ABC News reported on 23 April 2020.
One of those executed that day was Mujtaba al-Sweikat, who was arrested at King Fahd International Airport as he was about to fly to the U.S. to take up undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan. He was originally arrested in 2012 for allegedly taking part in anti-government demonstrations, according to his case file compiled by the human rights charity Reprieve.
According to the European-Saudi Organisation for Human Rights (ESOHR), up to six of those executed last year, al-Sweikat included, were arrested for crimes committed when they were teenagers.
Maya Foa, the director of Reprieve, told ABC News that the time had come for Saudi Arabia’s Western allies to hold the Saudi regime accountable for its human rights record, in a country where “families are denied the right to mourn, as a reminder to hold their tongues.”
“We are insisting on recovering the body, because receiving your son's body means to receive your son,” the mother said in correspondence with ESOHR from 20 April, which was shared with ABC News. “This is the least possible right that can be given to a family bereaved by the killing of its son. We want to bury him in his land and his hometown in the soil of the land...where he was raised.”
Ali Adubisi, the director of ESOHR, said that the Saudi regime were “sending a message” by withholding the body and denying the family’s right to mourn. Of those executed in April last year, 33 families are confirmed as not receiving the bodies of their loved ones, while the state of the other four bodies is not known, according to ESOHR.