August 25
INDIA:
Children die imitating execution
India's 1st execution in 13 years has claimed an additional toll of at
least 2 children dead in mishaps as they re-enacted the highly publicised
hanging of a man convicted of raping and murdering a schoolgirl.
2 weeks ago, 41-year-old Dhananjoy Chatterjee was hanged in the eastern
city of Kolkata after 13 years on death row.
On Sunday, 14-year-old Prem Gaekwad died when he tied one end of a rope
around his neck and swung the other end on a ceiling fan in his Mumbai
home, in an apparent re-enactment.
"The boy's father told us Prem was a very bright but curious kid and kept
asking questions about how Dhananjoy would be hanged," said assistant
police inspector Dilip Suryawanshi.
"Dhananjoy was the top news on all TV channels for so many days and Prem
would watch very closely."
Last week, a 12-year-old girl died in the eastern state of West Bengal,
when she tried to demonstrate for her younger brother how Chatterjee was
executed, newspapers said.
And a 10-year-old boy in the same state almost died last week when he and
his friends acted out the execution, taking the roles of Chatterjee, the
hangman, a doctor and the prison warden.
"Children have a natural curiosity about anything out of the ordinary,"
psychiatrist
(source: Reuters)
MIDDLE EAST:
Experts: Beheadings pervert legitimate law
Muslim captors who behead their hostages call it execution, but many more
call it murder.
And the Tuesday discovery of American Paul Johnson Jr.'s head in the
freezer of a Saudi Arabian villa rekindled the horror a succession of
decapitations created in recent months.
Experts on Islam and Arab culture have said the kidnappers who behead
civilians likely point to the strictest interpretation of Islamic law --
Shariah -- as justification for their deeds. But several contend that
comparison is not a legitimate one.
Executions are part of a judicial process. But Daniel Pearl, Paul Johnson,
Nicholas Berg and Kim Sun-il were all killed, although never arrested,
tried or convicted of crimes.
"It's not even a perversion of the law," said Samer Shehata of Georgetown
University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. "It's just a perversion
because the law does not say you have to behead someone.
"It's absurd to even speak about it in [a legal context]. These are
terrorists, extremists, who want to draw attention to themselves at
maximum impact by gruesome images and horrific acts."
And there's another important distinction: the victim's suffering. In
countries that practice beheading in the context of a legal execution,
professionals carry out the act swiftly, generally with one blow, and
death occurs within seconds.
But that has not been the case with some of the recent decapitations.
"It was akin to an animal being slaughtered," said Bernard Haykel, a
professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at New York University who
saw one of the executions on a Web site. "It was literally how you
slaughter sheep. ...They slit the throat (at) the two carotid arteries,
and they severed the head."
Universal revulsion
The beheadings have caused revulsion in the United States, where legal
execution occurs in front of limited spectators and with a ban on anything
"cruel and unusual."
But experts say the recent beheadings are considered heinous in Arab and
Muslim nations despite decapitation being a permissible punishment in some
Middle Eastern countries.
"Many people in countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar and elsewhere think
that beheading -- if it is done appropriately, that is, if a person is
found guilty at the end of a trial with evidence and witnesses, and [the
execution] is done in a humane manner -- then it would be acceptable,"
said Shehata, an assistant professor of politics.
"But that is a fundamentally different scenario," he said, "than the case
of Nick Berg or Paul Johnson or the South Korean, where someone just took
a kitchen knife and cut somebody's head off. That is disgusting
universally."
Although once allowed in France, Britain, other European countries and the
state of Utah in the United States, decapitation as a punishment no longer
exists in the Western world.
"I think they have chosen this form of execution because it has a
terrifying effect," said Michael Doran, an expert on Islam at the Council
of Foreign Relations.
"When you hear about the Irish reporter who was shot in Riyadh and then
Johnson, who was beheaded, the Johnson beheading had a much greater effect
than the shooting of the Irish reporter," said Doran, who teaches Near
Eastern studies at Princeton University.
Criminal code, spiritual law
Beheading as an execution option remains a part of the criminal legal code
in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran and Qatar, Haykel said. Only Saudi Arabia
continues the practice.
However, insurgents justify the decapitations they conduct by pointing to
spiritual laws, Haykel said.
"The terrorists have said ... the movement of al Qaeda represents the true
Islamic state... and [they] claim the right to kill prisoners of war,"
said Haykel, the author of several books on Islam.
"That is consistent with Islamic law if one recognizes al Qaeda as the
properly constituted head of the Islamic state," Haykel said. "It is a
legitimate practice in Islamic law to behead your enemy if the ruler so
deems it as a punishment that is required."
Doran concurred that the militants may be looking to Shariah to justify
the brutality of the deaths.
"You can come up with a Shariah justification for it," he said, "but you
can come up with a Shariah justification for a lot of things."
(source: CNN)
