Saudi Arabia advertises vacancies for eight executioners

RIYADH // Saudi Arabia has advertised vacancies for eight executioners.

The civil service ministry said on Tuesday that no qualifications were necessary and that applicants would be exempted from entrance exams.

The ministry added that successful candidates would also be expected to carry out amputations ordered by the kingdom’s Sharia courts.

The vacancies were advertised on the ministry’s website in the religious jobs section.

Executions in the kingdom are carried out in public, and laws banning filming the practise are often flouted. In January, footage of a woman from Myanmar being executed in Mecca emerged on the internet. Layla bint Abdul Mutaleb Bassim was convicted of sexualling abusing and murdering her seven-year-old step daughter.

The recruitment comes after the kingdom beheaded nearly as many people since the start of the year as it did in the whole of 2014.

In 2014, Saudi Arabia executed 87 people according to an AFP count, ranking it third in the world for use of the death penalty.

This year, it has put 84 people to death in what Amnesty International has described as a “macabre spike”.

The Saudi interior ministry says the death penalty is an important deterrent.

But on a visit to Riyadh this month, Francois Hollande, the French president, said capital punishment “should be banned”.

* Agence France-Presse