Urgent Human Rights Report
Somali Youth Await Execution in Saudi Arabia: A Crisis Met with Deadly Silence.
Beheading in Saudi Arabia – Photo
“The sword waits for them as they watch others beheaded before their eyes.”
Djibouti City, Djibouti — June 2025
A chilling human rights crisis is unfolding in the shadows of a Saudi detention facility in Najran. According to a translated testimony by Abdirizak Hassan Aadan, shared with a Somali news outlet based in Nairobi, 56 Somali nationals are currently on death row in Saudi Arabia—imprisoned for nearly a decade, tortured into confessions, and condemned without due process. They are part of a larger group of 300–400 Somalis detained under similar circumstances.
These youth, many of them barely in their twenties when captured, were apprehended while crossing from Yemen into Saudi Arabia—fleeing violence, poverty, and statelessness. Instead of protection, they encountered brutality: Saudi border forces beat and tortured them, extracting false confessions under duress, and condemned them to death as scapegoats in a growing crackdown on African migrants.
Eyewitness accounts describe a horrifying ritual of state-sanctioned execution. Detainees are sorted by numbers, lined up, and made to watch their peers beheaded by sword, knowing they are next. Four were executed this morning. Only one was allowed to make a final call to his family. Thirteen have been executed to date. Eight were from one village. Four were blood relatives of the witness. The most recent victims came from Qalooji in the Faafan region of Ethiopia’s Somali Kilil.
This is not the first time Saudi Arabia’s cruelty toward African migrants has drawn attention. In August 2023, reports by Human Rights Watch and the Mixed Migration Centre revealed that Saudi border guards systematically shot and shelled Ethiopian migrants fleeing Yemen, in some cases using explosive weapons against unarmed refugees. The Red Sea crossing—once a path of escape—became a death trap. And yet, the world looked away.
Nor is this the first time the Saudi regime has shown a blatant disregard for human life. The 2018 assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, dismembered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, became a global symbol of state violence. Today, in Najran, a different kind of slow-motion massacre is underway—far from cameras, far from outrage, but no less deliberate.
And what have Somali leaders done? Nothing.
Despite appeals from grieving families, the Somali government and its consulate in Riyadh have remained silent. This inaction, in the face of such systemic execution of Somali nationals, is nothing short of complicity. Their silence is not neutral—it is enabling. It is accomplice to murder.
Where are the voices of conscience? Where is the diplomatic protest? Where is the demand for justice?
If Jamal Khashoggi’s death prompted international outrage, how much more should the mass beheading of vulnerable Somali youth prompt immediate action?
We issue this urgent call:
To Somali authorities: break your silence. Demand the release of all Somali detainees in Saudi Arabia. Your inaction is costing lives.
To international human rights organizations: send fact-finding missions, document this abuse, and call for an immediate moratorium on executions.
To the UN Special Rapporteurs on extrajudicial killings, torture, and migrants: investigate and intervene.
To Saudi Arabia: end these executions, release the victims of wrongful detention, and halt the violent persecution of African migrants.
This is a moment of reckoning. Either we stand against this cruelty now—or history will remember our silence as betrayal.
#SaveSomaliYouth #StopSaudiExecutions #JusticeForMigrants
HANAHR Human Rights Monitoring Team