SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTERKuwait hanged seven prisoners on Wednesday, among them Sheikh Faisal Abdullah al-Jaber al-Sabah, believed to be the first member of a Gulf oil monarchy to face execution. Al-Sabah was convicted of premeditated murder and illegal possession of a firearm after killing his nephew in 2010, according to Reuters.SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER The victim, Sheikh Basel Salem Sabah al-Salem al-Sabah, was also a prince. He was the murderer’s nephew but was 20 years older than his uncle Sheikh Faisal. Basel’s father was Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States between 1970 and 1975. As the Khaleej Times tells the tale, the wheelchair-bound Sheikh Basel was invited to a private conversation at the Maseelah Palace by Sheikh Faisal, who proceeded to shoot him 5 to 7 times at close range with his army service pistol. Kuwaiti officials have not been forthcoming about why Faisal did this, aside from ruling out “political motives” for the killing. The prisoners hanged along with Faisal included a woman who set fire to a tent at her husband’s second wedding, killing over 40 women and children, plus three men and two women from Bangladesh, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Philippines.
According to Reuters, their offenses included “murder, attempted murder, kidnapping and rape.” Sky News reports the Filipino woman was a former nanny convicted of killing her employer’s daughter. “Migrant workers such as Ms Pawa are over-represented in death penalty and execution statistics across the Persian Gulf, where they frequently suffer from a lack of legal representation and may be deprived of a court translator,” the report notes. These were Kuwait’s first executions since 2013 and came shortly after Bahrain’s first executions in seven years, part of a resurgence in death sentences across the Gulf States. “Those executed include young people who were children when they were arrested, political protesters, and people who were tortured into bogus ‘confessions,'” director Harriet McCulloch of the anti-death-penalty group Reprieve told Sky News. “This sweeping and illegal use of the death penalty has nothing to do with justice or the rule of law.”
Transit area at the First Floor. 2 Prayer Halls, 3 Restaurants, Duty Free Shops, CA Information Desk, FRCL/EXE Class lounges, VIP Lounge, Bank, Transfer Desk of KU and NAS (Handling Agents at Apt). Distance 20km. Public Transport available from 0500 hrs to 2200 hrs at 250 Fils. Airport taxis available round the clock and the charge to city is KWD 7.000 onwards. Wheelchair arranged by Handling Agents. Airport Clinic, Café, Restaurants, Shopping Centres, Bank, Travel Agencies, Pharmacies, Duty Free Shops, Money Exchange Companies, Valet Parking, Airport Special Handling Unit ( who will assist passengers on payment of service charge.) AI Check-in counter at Zone 4 Counters opens 3 hours prior to departure and closes 1 hour prior to departure. Lounge is provided to First/Executive class passengers. Internet/Fax/TV/Refreshments/ Reading materials/Massage Chairs available.DHAHRAN, Saudi Arabia, Dec. 1— New refugees arriving here after fleeing Kuwait have offered emotional accounts of continuing Iraqi killings, rapes, torture and forced evacuation of civilians.
The victims include a 12-year-old girl who was sexually attacked by an Iraqi soldier two weeks ago, according to a detailed account provided by a Kuwaiti doctor who said she had tended the abused child. More than 300,000 Kuwaitis, nearly half the population, are now estimated to have fled into Saudi Arabia, Kuwaiti and Saudi officials say. Most first come to hotels here in Dhahran, where those interviewed were found. Taken together, their reports offer a vivid picture of an occupied country veering between emotional destitution and determined resistance to Iraqi annexation. 'I Refuse to Become Iraqi' "I can't imagine giving up my Kuwait nationality for anything," declared the doctor, who fled across the border to this town this week. "I left in part because I refuse to become Iraqi." Then, in clinical terms that seemed chosen to permit her to keep control of her emotions, the doctor precisely detailed the rape by Iraqi soldiers of six different women whose injuries she said she had tended.
"The incidence of rape is now increasing in a pattern that seems to be repeated, like a contagious disease," she said. "Iraqi soldiers enter a home, tie up the men, rob the valuables and then rape the women." "Most of the women I saw were molested and then sodomized," the doctor said. "When I saw them, they were in a state of shock, still denying what had happened to them." Names Withheld in Fear Like all of the recent refugees interviewed, the doctor would not give her name, because she said she still had 12 relatives in Kuwait and feared Iraqi retribution against them. Her accounts were highly detailed, and she showed a Kuwaiti Medical Association card identifying her as a physician. She would not give the names of the rape victims she had tended, but did provide their ages, the dates of the attacks and the locations. The doctor said the 12-year-old girl had been attacked by an Iraqi soldier who was one of a group that entered her home in the suburb of Bayan in Kuwait City two weeks ago.
The girl said the soldier had abused her in front of her father and mother, the doctor said, adding that the girl's mother had told of bribing the soldier with $3,000 to stop him from raping her daughter. The doctor said she had also tended two sisters who had been abused by Iraqi soldiers who entered their home two weeks ago in the Kuwait City suburb of Rumathia. One sister, 19, had scratches on her breast, a bite on her neck and bruising, the doctor said. The other sister, 22, was so severely sodomized that her anus was torn, the doctor said. She said the woman's attacker was named Adnan, a tall Iraqi soldier with light brown hair. "The girls were still in shock, but their mother cried and told me, 'I wish they had killed me instead of doing this to my girls.' The doctor said the head nurse at the main military hospital in Kuwait City was raped at the beginning of the occupation by an Iraqi officer who was outraged when the nurse told him she would keep working in the hospital "because she felt it was her duty as a Kuwaiti."
"He took her to a room and raped her for an hour," the doctor said. "Many doctors and nurses at the hospital are witnesses to this." The doctor also detailed a growing shortage of medicines, worsened by the Iraqi confiscation of the main medical warehouse in the suburb of Sabham three weeks ago. "We were only seeing emergency cases," the doctor said. "We have so few resources that we have to turn the rest away." One of those who says he suffered as a consequence is a Kuwaiti refugee who gave his name as Abdul Nabib, 45. A double amputee, confined to a wheelchair, he says he fled Kuwait two weeks ago in a car with relatives. Mr. Nabib said that when the Iraqis invaded, he was lying in a hospital bed recovering from an operation to amputate his feet that had become infected as a consequence of diabetes. "The Iraqi soldiers came into my hospital room and took my artificial limbs," he said, speaking through a translator. "I told them I needed them for walking, but they didn't pay me any attention."
His Son Was Taken Away Mr. Nabib added that Iraqi soldiers took away his 25-year-old son a month and a half ago and that he has not been seen since. He refused to give his son's name. "Many families have suffered this," Mr. Nabib said. "I will have to endure it just as they endure it." A 45-year-old Kuwaiti exile who gave his name only as Mohammed said Iraqi soldiers shot a 19-year-old boy, Sadia Ali Jassim, in the head in front of his mother, after accusing him of helping the resistance. The killing occurred on Sept. 26 in the suburb of Khaldia of Kuwait City, he said. Mohammed's 17-year-old son, who was a friend of the slain boy, said he carried the body wrapped in a white sheet to a graveyard. The 17-year-old son refused to give his name because he has family who could be identified by the Iraqis, he said. "When we carried Sadia's body to the grave, the blood ran from the wounded head and stained my cheeks red," the boy said. He added that two other boys executed by the Iraqis were being buried the same day.