Nearly four months after a Nigerian was executed in Saudi Arabia
for alleged drug-related offence, two more countrymen have been killed
in a similar manner, sending fears to no fewer than 15 others being
detained in parts of the Middle East country.
Prison Sources in Saudi Arabia confirmed to Saturday Vanguard that
the two Nigerians, whose names have been given as Ibrahim Ciroma and
Maimidu Issah, all from the Northern part of Nigeria, were executed last
week.
The prison source said that while one was brutally terminated on
Tuesday, the other Nigerian faced the hangman’s noose on Thursday.
The summary execution of the two Nigerians came nearly two weeks
after a prison source in Medina leaked the names of 15 Nigerians, who
are currently on death row at the Medina Prison, awaiting the long knife
any moment from now.
Saturday Vanguard had on January 13 this year, published a
Save-Our-Soul letter despatched by the embattled Nigerians awaiting
execution in Riyadh to President Muhammadu Buhari and pleaded with him
to intervene and save their lives by repatriating them home to serve
their jail terms in their father land or be killed at home and given
decent burials instead of being killed as cows in a foreign land.
In response, the Federal Government, through the Minister of
Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama, affirmed the determination of the
government to wade into the matter and save the lives of the imprisoned
Nigerians in Saudi Arabia.
The Minister promised to dispatch officials from the Nigerian
Embassy in Riyadh to liaise with their Saudi counterparts so as to
prevent the inmates from being executed.
‘’The Minister of Foreign Affairs has directed the Nigerian
Mission in Riyadh to look into the detained suspects’ case urgently,” the Spokesman for the Ministry, Dr. Tope Adeleye Elias-Fatile, said in response to Saturday Vanguard’s enquiry on the matter.
“The Nigerian Government will continue to engage the Saudi authorities in negotiations so that they will not be executed,” the Foreign Ministry assured.
However, more than two weeks after the report was made to the
Nigerian Government and with no action coming from Abuja, the additional
two Nigerians drug suspects were sent to their early graves.
It was learnt that following the directive of the Federal
Government to the embassy in Riyadh to intervene and save the troubled
Nigerians from death row, the Nigerian embassy simply requested for the
file numbers of the inmates from the prison officials and nothing else
was done about it.
One of the suspects told Saturday Vanguard on Friday that an
indication that more of the detainees might be executed any moment from
now was that their files had been removed from the prison in Medina and
its computer system.
“For your information, the removal of the inmate files from the
system in Saudi means that the affected persons could be summarily
executed any moment from now. Please plead with President Buhari and the
government of Nigeria to save us from being killed this wicked way.
Delay is dangerous,” the suspect pleaded.