Group attacks Saudi over Sri Lankan executions

RIYADH, Feb 22 (Reuters) An international rights group said today that four Sri Lankans beheaded in Saudi Arabia this week for armed robbery suffered a sham trial and that two of the men may not have known they were sentenced to death.

The bodies of the four men, beheaded by the sword in a public square in Riyadh on Monday, were displayed on wooden crosses for over an hour as a deterrent, amid fears of an increase in organised crime among expatriates.

The kingdom, which is home to Islam's holiest shrines, applies strict Islamic law and regularly beheads murderers, rapists and drug traffickers.

New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), which followed the case and said it managed to speak to one of the men by telephone several days before execution, said they were victims of poverty and arbitrary justice that denied them legal representation.

''The execution of these four migrants, who had been badly beaten and locked up for years without access to lawyers, is a travesty of justice,'' the group's West Asia and North Africa director Sarah Leah Whitson said in a statement.

One of the men, Ranjith de Silva, told the group he had been driven to commit the crimes in 2004 by ''financial desperation''.

He said he came to the country for work paying 400 riyals per month (7), but his employer only paid 250 riyals.

''He claims that at no stage of his arrest, interrogation, detention, or trial was he ever told that he could see a lawyer,'' said HRW in the statement dated February. 21 which appeared on the group's Web site on Thursday.

It said that during a fact-finding mission to Saudi Arabia in November HRW was told that two of the men had been sentenced to 15 years in prison. ''Indeed, two of those convicted may have been unaware that they had been sentenced to death,'' it said.

The men were not informed of an appeal hearing that took place which upheld the verdicts.

Sri Lanka's government made an appeal for clemency in the case, which has highlighted the plight of millions of migrant labourers in Saudi Arabia and Saudi fears of social tension.

Almost one third of Saudi Arabia's population of 24 million people are foreigners, mostly blue-collar workers from Asia.

Most are tied to Saudi employers who usually take their passports as a way of controlling their movements and behaviour, a system rights groups says deprives expatriates of rights.

But police and religious officials said this week that there was a growing underworld of criminal behaviour among foreigners.

REUTERS BDP PM1515