- Saudi Arabia executed 81 men on Saturday.
- The executed were convicted of terrorism, murder, kidnapping, torture, and rape said reports.
- Saudi Arabia's death penalty policies have been condemned as "an abhorrent and inhuman punishment."
Saudi Arabia executed a record 81 people in a single day on Saturday.
Reports say it is Saudi Arabia's largest mass execution in modern history. It tops the execution of 63 militants following the worst-ever terrorist attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979.
The state-run Saudi Press Agency announced the executions on March 12, saying that "The aforementioned individuals were arrested, tried in Saudi courts, through trials overseen by a total of 13 judges over 3 separate stages of trial for each individual."
It added: "Crimes committed by these individuals also include pledging allegiance to foreign terrorist organizations, such as ISIS [ISIL], al-Qaeda, and the Houthis."
According to the Saudi Interior Ministry, most of those executed were Saudis, the Wall Street Journal report.
They also note that more than half were from the minority Shiite Muslim population, seven of the dead were Yemeni nationals, and one was Syrian.
However, the Journal reports that the interior ministry did not disclose the methods of execution, which have in the past included beheading by sword.
It is unclear what caused these executions to occur on Saturday specifically, although they come as most of the world looks to Ukraine and Russia.
Death sentences can be handed out for a wide variety of nonviolent offenses in Saudi Arabia, "including apostasy, sorcery, and adultery," the US State Department noted in a 2019 assessment of the country's human rights record.
"The death penalty is an abhorrent and inhuman punishment. There is no credible evidence that it deters crime more than prisons terms," Clare Algar, Amnesty International's Senior Director for Research, Advocacy and Policy, said when commenting on the executions that occurred in 2019.
In 2021 the kingdom performed 67 executions in all of 2021 and 27 in 2020, according to The Guardian.