Saudi Arabia on Sunday put to death three citizens convicted of having killed a security officer and creating a “terrorist cell”, the interior ministry said, according to AFP.
In a statement, the Saudi interior ministry said the three men had killed an officer in the capital Riyadh and burned his body by setting fire to his vehicle.
They were also convicted of financing terrorism and possessing weapons, ammunition and “material used in the manufacture of explosives,” the ministry said.
Authorities carried out the death sentences on Sunday in Riyadh, the ministry added.
Since the start of the year, Saudi authorities have executed 52 people, including 20 for terrorism-related offenses, an AFP tally found.
Saudi Arabia has one of the world’s highest execution rates, and has often carried out previous death sentences by beheading.
Most executions for “terrorism” this year have taken place in the Sunni Muslim kingdom’s eastern region where the Shiite minority is concentrated, the AFP report noted.
Last month Saudi Arabia executed two Bahrainis, also for terrorist-related offenses.
Saudi Arabia regularly announces that it has foiled terrorist attacks and at times executes the suspected terrorists.
In March of last year, the kingdom executed a record 81 people in one day for terrorism-related offenses.
In 2018, Saudi security forces neutralized a man who was wearing what looked like an explosive vest in the city of Al-Bukayriyah and wounded him in an exchange of gunfire. The suspect reportedly “adopted Islamic State ideology”.
In July of 2017, the kingdom executed four people convicted of terrorism in the eastern part of the kingdom.
The four had been convicted of taking up weapons against the government, joined armed groups and attacked a police station and security patrols.
In late June of that year, the kingdom said it foiled a terror plot targeting the Grand Mosque in Mecca.
Several months earlier, the country”s Interior Ministry said it had arrested at least eight suspected terrorists plotting killings and a car bombing.
