Blood red “Renaissance”. With Mohammed bin Salman in government, executions doubled in Saudi Arabia

The “Saudi renaissance” is dripping with blood. Under the leadership of the prince Mohammed bin Salman the number of executions in the country doubled. As he reports on his blog Foreign pages the journalist Michael George the death sentences carried out this year there have already been more than 40. The last two victims are two citizens of Bahrain accused of planning acts of “terrorism”. According to Saudi authorities, Jaafar Sultan and Sadeq Thamer they were alleged members of a terrorist cell. Amnesty International however, he reported that Sultan and Thamer were arrested in 2015 and sentenced in 2021. They later told the judges they had been tortured and that their confessions were coerced.

Last week, Riyadh handed down the death sentence for others three Saudi nationals. The execution of three members of the tribe also appears imminent Howeitat in Tabuk province in northwest Saudi Arabia, accused of having resisted the eviction to make way for the futuristic Neom “city in the desert” project, strongly desired by Mohammed bin Salman. Saudi prince, head of government from September 2022, he is held responsible for the assassination of the Saudi dissident journalist by the CIA Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi, killed and then dismembered in Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul embassy in 2018. Since 2015, executions have been more than a thousand death sentences. Nine convicts have been killed this month alone.

In January 2021 the leader of Italia Viva Matthew Renzi, during a public meeting with bin Salman held in Riyadh, he defined Saudi Arabia as the place where there were conditions for a “new renaissance”. Italian exports to the Middle Eastern country reached a value of 4.1 billion euros in 2022, up on the previous year. At the beginning of May the Minister of Made in Italy Adolfo Urso he stated that “Relations between Italy and Saudi Arabia are progressively expanding and strengthening at all levels, economic and commercial”. Barbara Beltrame Giacomello, one of the 13 vice-presidents of Confindustria commented “Saudi Arabia is a market that we must not lose at the moment: we must absolutely give our skills, our know-how. Relations with Saudi Arabia are excellent”.