Other Witchcraft- and sorcery-accusation violence State or organised anti-witchcraft campaign Al-Jawf Province, Saudi Arabia · 2011

Saudi Arabia: a woman in her sixties beheaded for 'witchcraft and sorcery', an offence carrying the death penalty

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Record class

Institutional event

Evidence status

Official finding

Authority role

the Saudi state, which prosecutes 'witchcraft and sorcery' as a capital offence and carried out the execution, the religious police (mutawa), a member of whom supplied the account of what the woman was said to have done

Organization

Saudi Ministry of Interior, Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (religious police), Amnesty International (source of the execution count)

Archive classification

This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.

This record sits deliberately in the inverse category, and the reason is worth stating because the case could be read either way. The conduct attributed to the woman by a police source — taking money from people by claiming she could cure their illnesses — is the pattern this archive documents in hundreds of `core` records. But she was not convicted of fraud. She was executed for «practising witchcraft and sorcery», an offence that punishes the supposed possession of occult power rather than any harm done with it, and that treats the reality of the power as established by the conviction. The state, not any practitioner, is the authority whose exercise the record documents. Where CAR imprisons for the same offence and the Gambia detained on the same premise, Saudi Arabia executes.

Curse or witchcraft threat

Scope decision

CATEGORY: filed as `accusation-violence` / `accusation-violence-state`, `state-terror`, `institutional-event`, with `convictedParty` recorded as `other` — the person punished is the accused, not a spiritual authority over any victim, and a reader filtering this corpus for convicted practitioners must not pick it up. This follows the precedent of the Gambia and Central African Republic records. WHY THIS IS NOT A `core` FRAUD RECORD, despite the healing-for-money allegation: that allegation comes from an unnamed member of the religious police quoted in a newspaper, not from any judgment. No court is identified, no trial record exists in the public domain, no defence is described and no appeal is recorded. The archive cannot treat an untested police characterisation as an adjudicated finding, and it will not record a person executed by a state as a convicted fraudster on that basis. WHAT IS RECORDED is what is documented: that Saudi Arabia executed a woman for the offence of sorcery. The woman is named because her name was published by the state and internationally reported, and because a person executed by a state should not be anonymous in a record of that execution. Her age is given as reported. The $800 figure and the execution counts are Amnesty International's and al-Hayat's respectively, attributed as such. Saudi Arabia previously had one record in this archive, a CRC finding on child marriage.

Evidence structure

Proceedings

2011-12-12 · capital sentence carried out; no trial record, defence or appeal identified

Saudi Arabia — execution announced by the Ministry of Interior; no court identified in the reporting. Amina bint Abdul Halim bin Salem Nasser, a woman reported to be in her sixties, was beheaded in the northern province of Al-Jawf on 12 December 2011 after conviction for «practising witchcraft and sorcery». The interior ministry announced the execution. A member of the religious police, quoted by the newspaper al-Hayat, said she «had tricked people into giving her money, claiming that she could cure their illnesses», charging up to $800 a session. No court is named in the reporting, no trial detail is given, and no appeal is described; the report notes that many of those executed in the kingdom have had no defence lawyer and were not informed about the legal proceedings against them. Amnesty International recorded the execution as the 73rd in Saudi Arabia that year, against 27 in 2010 and 67 the year before that.

Documented coercion mechanisms

an offence of 'practising witchcraft and sorcery' that carries the death penalty and has no statutory definition in Saudi law
an execution announced by the interior ministry with no court named and no trial record published
proceedings in which, as the reporting notes, those executed «have had no defence lawyer and are not informed about the legal proceedings against them»

Cited record

Sources

international broadcaster news report 'Saudi Arabia beheads woman for sorcery', Al Jazeera, 13 December 2011.: Reports that «Amina bint Abdul Halim bin Salem Nasser» was beheaded on Monday 12 December 2011 in the northern province of Jawf after conviction for «practising witchcraft and sorcery», the execution announced by the interior ministry. Quotes al-Hayat citing a member of the religious police that she was in her 60s and «had tricked people into giving her money, claiming that she could cure their illnesses», charging up to $800 a session. Records that many of those executed «have had no defence lawyer and are not informed about the legal proceedings against them», and that Amnesty International counted the execution as the kingdom's 73rd that year, against 27 in 2010 and 67 the year before.

Source provenance

Source access and integrity log

This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.

Source and tier basis: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2011/12/13/saudi-arabia-beheads-woman-for-sorcery Corpus classification: international-broadcaster; evidentiary role: contemporaneous report of a state execution. Not a judicial document; no judgment exists in the public domain.
Retrieval: 2026-07-29 · Preserved; Bound by Fear research cycle 2026-07-29 (Al Jazeera searched at the project owner's suggestion after an audit found it cited in only 6 records; article read in full; the name, date, province, offence, police characterisation, absence of trial detail and Amnesty execution counts taken verbatim; deliberately classified as inverse-category state action rather than as a fraud conviction, because no court or judgment is identified)

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