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![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/01\/danziger-saudi-witchcraft-execution1-e1325790074101.gif\" "\\"danziger-saudi-witchcraft-execution1\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nWitchcraft is a capital offense in Saudi Arabia. Recently, another person was executed:<\/p>\n
The Saudi Interior Ministry announced on Monday that it had beheaded a woman named Amina bint Abdul Halim bin Salem Nasser for practicing \u201cwitchcraft and sorcery.\u201d The London-based al-Hayat newspaper, citing the chief of the religious police who arrested the woman after a report from a female investigator, claims Nasser was tricking people into paying $800 per session to have their illnesses cured. (source)<\/p>\n
How do prosecutors prove that someone is in fact a witch?<\/p>\n
[T]he bar for proving someone guilty isn\u2019t very high. Witch hunting is fairly institutionalized in Saudi Arabia, with the country\u2019s religious police running an Anti-Witchcraft Unit and a sorcery hotline to combat practices like astrology and fortune telling that are considered un-Islamic.<\/p>\n
But institutionalized is not the same thing as codified. A top official in the kingdom\u2019s Ministry of Justice told Human Rights Watch in 2008 that there is no legal definition for witchcraft (Saudi Arabia doesn\u2019t have a penal code) or specific body of evidence that has probative value in witchcraft trials.<\/p>\n
Instead, judges have wide latitude in interpreting Sharia law and sentencing suspected criminals. And Amnesty International claims these judges use witchcraft charges to arbitrarily \u201dpunish people, generally after unfair trials, for exercising their right to freedom of speech or religion.\u201d A Human Rights Watch researcher tells The Media Line that foreigners in particular are often the targets of sorcery accusations because of their traditional practices or, occasionally, because Saudi men facing charges of sexual harassment by domestic workers want to discredit their accusers.<\/p>\n
The evidence arrayed against witchcraft suspects typically revolves around statements from accusers and suspicious personal belongings that suggest the supernatural, in a country where superstition is still widespread. (source)<\/p>\n
In 2007, Saudi authorities beheaded an Egyptian pharmacist who had been accused by neighbors of casting spells to separate a man from his wife and placing Korans in mosque bathrooms. \u201cHe confessed to adultery with a woman and desecrating the Koran by placing it in the bathroom,\u201d the Saudi Press Agency reported, adding that books on black magic, a candle with an incantation \u201cto summon devils,\u201d and \u201cfoul-smelling herbs\u201d had been found in the pharmacist\u2019s home. …source<\/a><\/p>\n