Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis by John R. Bradley

Author:John R. Bradley [Bradley, John R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9781466893047
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2015-03-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

URBAN CRIME WAVE

For a square mile the Saudi traffic cops, sitting at junctions in groups of three or four on their parked motorcycles, were communicating with each other via walkie-talkies. Half an hour earlier, they had closed off the flow of traffic from all the side streets in the district. On the main stretch of the now deserted Medina Road, the main artery in Jeddah usually chockablock with traffic and that leads directly to chop-chop square, all the traffic lights were permanently set to green. At the bottom of the road, next to the square itself, dozens of cars had been parked randomly, sometimes four or five deep, making it nearly impossible to navigate the adjoining roundabout. Their owners had abandoned them, despite the protests of a solitary traffic policeman blowing his whistle and shouting abuse at them for doing so, because of their eagerness to get a glimpse of the only form of public entertainment in Saudi Arabia that exists, apart from soccer matches: a beheading.

Since they are not announced in advance—even to the man or woman selected for execution—and can take place on any day of the week, those who get to see beheadings in Saudi Arabia do so by chance. Hence the last-minute commotion. Those who happened to be passing by that day were especially lucky, it turned out, for what was planned was an even rarer event: a double beheading.

Hundreds had formed a ring around the chopping block. Hundreds more spanned out over the main road and the surrounding open space. Perched on walls or clinging to the sides of a clock tower in the middle of Medina Road, all were happily suffering the intense discomfort of direct and prolonged exposure to the desert sun in the middle of a blisteringly hot summer’s day.

In the square, which doubled as a parking lot, armed cops were stationed every 10 yards, their backs turned to the block and their eyes fixed sternly on the crowd. They were there in case the relatives of the men to be slain tried to sabotage the executions at the last minute. It was also their job to make sure no one took any photographs or video footage. Such material, very occasionally shot clandestinely in the past, had proven highly effective propaganda in the West for those opposed to the Al-Saud regime, ever determined as they are to provide evidence of the “barbaric Wahhabi culture” the ruling family presides over.

There were both men and women in the closely observed crowd, standing side by side, taking advantage of an unusual relaxation of the rules governing the strict segregation of the sexes in public. The majority of the men were Third World immigrants. Since the women were covered from head to toe in black, they could have been from anywhere, although most of the excited chatter coming from beneath the veils of those near me was in Arabic.

The executioner himself, Muhammad Saad Al-Beshi, was recognizable from a photograph that had been published a few weeks earlier in Arab News, in which he had given a rare interview.

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