Saudi Arabia is so busy with chopping people’s heads off that it needs eight more executioners to carry out an increasing number of death sentences.
To apply for a job as an executioner, a person doesn’t need any special qualifications other than the ability to swing the sword of death, decapitating people sentenced to death and amputating the limbs of those guilty of lesser crimes.
The official title of the executioners is “religious functionaries” and they are classified as civil servants of the Saudi Arabian government.
Under the Islamic Kingdom’s strict sharia laws, crimes, such as drug-trafficking, rape, murder, apostasy and armed robbery are all punishable by death. Half of the executions carried out last year were for non-lethal offenses, according to Amnesty International.
Human rights organizations are extremely worried by the alarming increase in death sentences in Saudi Arabia, stating that the barbarous practice has to be abolished. The vast majority of countries around the world reject the death penalty.
