Saudi Arabia has been on a killing spree. In August, authorities beheaded Jalal Labbad, a young Shiite man who was a minor at the time of some of the charges against him. In June, the government executed Turki Al Jasser, a blogger who was critical of the government. And earlier this year, a Saudi woman named Maryam Al-Mutaib was put to death for witchcraft, sorcery, and the kidnapping of three newborns whom she later raised as her own.

Since the beginning of the year, Saudi authorities have beheaded more than 283 individuals, mainly for charges related to terrorism, treason, and drugs. Human rights experts fear that 2025 will surpass last year’s number of executions—which, at 345, made 2024 the deadliest year in Saudi Arabia in decades, with an average of one execution every 25 hours.

The surge in executions comes as a clear contradiction to Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s promise, in his 2022 interview with The Atlantic, to “get rid of” the death penalty except for cases where it is mandated under Shariah law. Instead, the Crown Prince is now using Saudi Arabia’s repressive judiciary system to silence dissent and spread fear far more aggressively than even his ousted predecessor, Mohammad bin Naif. In some cases, people are being executed for no apparent reason, like Abdullah Al Shamri, a Saudi public servant.

For many Saudis, Al Shamri’s death is a bewildering and shocking spectacle, absurd even for Saudi Arabia. Al Shamri worked for decades within the official Saudi establishment: He was a diplomat at the Saudi Embassy in Turkey, then an adviser at the Saudi Ministry of Culture and Media, where he enjoyed close proximity to high-ranking members of the Saudi royal family—connections he proudly flaunted by posting pictures on X of himself with King Salman, then–governor of Riyadh, and his son Mohammad bin Salman. He regularly published in Saudi newspapers and appeared on TV shows discussing Saudi diplomacy and commenting on Turkish affairs. Most recently, he held a senior position at the Saudi Royal Court.

Sources close to Al Shamri said he never expressed critical views of the Saudi government in public or in private. A Turkish academic who has known him for over a decade said that when they last met, in Istanbul in 2018, Al Shamri talked about his new position in the media affairs department at the Saudi Royal Court. “He told me he just started working for Mohammad bin Salman,” the academic said. “He was very happy with his new post.” After the news came out in 2017 that King Salman had ousted his nephew Mohammad bin Naif as Crown Prince and replaced him with his son Mohammed bin Salman, Al Shamri showed a great deal of enthusiasm toward the young prince. “He called Mohmmad bin Salman ‘Aslan,’ which means ‘lion’ in Turkish, and said that he will make Saudi Arabia great again,” the academic said.

Al Shamri’s name was buried in a Saudi Press Agency statement in February 2024, announcing his execution, along with six other men, on accusations of terrorism and treason. The Saudi authorities frequently lump together Shias, Sunnis, and foreigners in group or mass executions, a practice that makes it hard for observers to track individual charges. Details about Al Shamri’s legal proceedings are inaccessible, but according to the official statement, he was executed only two and a half years after his arrest—an unusually short period of time for capital punishment cases in Saudi, where it can take decades before the final execution takes place.

The type of controversial legal ruling used to justify his execution—the ta’zir verdict—is another sign that the Saudi government is blatantly lying about its pledge to reform the judicial system. The ta’zir ruling is a judicial interpretation for charges that are not explicitly defined in Shariah law, covering discretionary crimes. Almost all of the ta’zir rulings are handed down by the Saudi Specialized Court (SCC), which was established in 2008 to handle indictments related to terrorism and national security.

The court has been heavily criticized by Saudi activists and international human rights organizations. During his trial at the SCC, Saudi activist Waleed Abu al-Alkhair refuted the legitimacy of the court, arguing that it was established to deal with terrorism cases, not to prosecute peaceful activists. Nevertheless, the SCC convicted Abu al-Alkhair in 2014 for publicly criticizing the country’s human rights record and sentenced him to 15 years in prison. Amnesty International accused the Saudi government of exploiting the SCC to “create a false aura of legality around its abuse of the counter-terror law to silence its critics.”

Abdullah Alaoudh, a senior director for the Countering Authoritarianism hub at Middle East Democracy Center in Washington, DC—whose father, Sheikh Salman Alaoudh, has been facing a death sentence since 2018—said that the ta’zir punishment is “frowned upon” by most Islamic jurists, since it is banned within the school of Islamic jurisprudence that Saudi Arabia officially practices under. But the court charged Al Shamri with it anyway. “From all the comprehensive rulings in Islam, [they picked] something that is frowned upon, something that is a very minority opinion,” Alaoudh said. “They abused the ruling itself, [broadening] it to include political dissidents, or just critics.”

Alaoudh said that after the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the crown prince learned to get rid of critics by going through the judiciary, instead of through extrajudiciary means. But even with that in mind, Al Shamri’s case is unusual. “Al Shamri basically worked for Mohammad bin Salman,” Alaoudh said. “The crown prince is paranoid and insecure enough to go even after his allies.”