Saudi Bloodlust- Ali Sibat, Lebanese psychic sentenced to death

The Saudis have some sort of unquenchable blood lust the way they find any excuse to execute a man (or woman), even one who doesn't happen to be a citizen.

ali sabat vNbul 16105

Ali Sibat is a Lebanese psychic who was visiting Saudi Arabia, in May of last year. He was on a pilgrimage to Medina when he was arrested in his hotel room by Saudi police. On November 9th 2009, he was sentenced to death for practicing witchcraft. The death penalty?? For a man who is not a Saudi national, who was simply a visitor to the country?? And for what?

Before his arrest, Sibat frequently gave advice on general life questions and predictions about the future on the Lebanese satellite television station Sheherazade, according to the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar...

Apparently, fortune telling and horoscopes are un-Islamic and, obviously, worthy of death in Saudi Arabia. How backwards is that. We had our Salem witch trials in the 1600s and Saudi Arabia is still having them. And that's exactly what Human Rights Watch calls it.

"Saudi courts are sanctioning a literal witch hunt by the religious police," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. "The crime of ‘witchcraft' is being used against all sorts of behavior, with the cruel threat of state-sanctioned executions."

And what right do they have to condemn a man to death who isn't even a Saudi citizen. How dare they! Apparently Sibat was tricked into confessing he smuggled in books on witchcraft with the promise he would be sent home. They lied. And Sibat isn't the only one condemned for witchcraft. Fawzi Salih has been on death row for a coerced confession since 2006.

In another case, a Jeddah criminal court on October 8, 2006 convicted Eritrean national Muhammad Burhan for "charlatanry," based on a leather-bound personal phone booklet belonging to Burhan with writings in the Tigrinya alphabet used in Eritrea. Prosecutors classified the booklet as a "talisman" and the court accepted that as evidence, sentencing him to 20 months in prison and 300 lashes. No further evidence for the charge was introduced at trial. Burhan has since been deported, after serving more than double the time in prison to which the court had sentenced him.

Another man, Mustafa Ibrahiman, an Egyptian pharmacist working in the kingdom, was executed in 2007 for trying "to separate a married couple, through sorcery".

Since Saudi Arabia still has no penal code, it is left up to the judges discretion to mete out justice. So, so-called 'witches' are condemned to death for no justifiable reason. In a civilized world, witches are not executed, psychics are not executed. Visitors from other countries aren't arbitrarily executed for no good reason.

One obviously takes a huge risk traveling to Saudi Arabia with their whacked out justice system that has no penal code. Stay away from Saudi Arabia.