Saudi Arabia sentences atheist to death
Saudi Arabia sentenced a 20-year-old man to death for a series of posts on social media in which he was saying he is an atheist.
Ahmad Al-Shamri wrote in 2014 on Twitter that he renounces Islam and the prophet Mohamed.
His posts drew the attention of the religious police and brought him a death sentence.
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Human Rights Watch organisation claimed that the man was most likely mentally unstable. During the trial, Ahmad Al-Shamri pleaded for insanity, claiming that he has a medical issue and that he was drunk when he posted those comments online.
Nevertheless, the authorities in Saudi Arabia took into account only the Quran law when establishing his sentence and not his health problems.
Atheism is punishable by death in 13 Muslim states worldwide: Afghanistan, Iran, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.
Another famous case is that of blogger Raif Badawi, also from Saudi Arabia. He was arrested in 2012 and sentenced in Saudi Arabia at 10 years in jail and a thousand floggings in public. Badawi was later asked to pay a fine of $270,000 for ”insulting Islam”. His 2015 nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize did not help him.
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