RIYADH : Saudi Arabia on Thursday beheaded a convicted Pakistani drug trafficker, adding to what a United Nations rapporteur called a "very disturbing" surge in the kingdom's use of the death penalty. Ihsan al-Amin was executed in Riyadh after his conviction for heroin smuggling, the interior ministry said. He became the 90th person put to death this year, compared with 87 for the whole of 2014, according to AFP tallies. About half of those executed are foreigners.
The rise in Saudi executions is "out of line" with global trends where the numbers of executions and states which apply the death penalty are decreasing, Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, told AFP on Wednesday.