SAUDI ARABIA. THE FAMILY OF A SOMALI MAN WHO WAS EXECUTED BY SAUDI ARABIA WANTS HIS BODY - AND ANSWERS

the last time Ali Hassan Ibrahim saw his son Abdul Fattah was in 1999, when the Somali teenager left a refugee camp in Kenya to join the legions of foreign workers in Saudi Arabia. Abdul Fattah was jailed for theft within months of arriving in the oil-rich kingdom.
His family held out hope that he would be released. But on April 4, after five years of imprisonment, the 21-year-old was beheaded with five other Somali men in the city of Jeddah - without a fair trial or any warning, his family said.
As Somalis and human-rights groups worldwide condemned the execution, Ibrahim was calling for justice in the city that had been his home since 2001.
At a rally on April 22 in Monument Square, Portland, USA, he was flanked by more than 30 members of Maine's largest Somali community, as well as activists from Peace Action Maine and the Portland branch of the NAACP.
"They kill my son, without fair justice," Ibrahim said through an interpreter, as rally participants toted signs with cartoon depictions of bloody beheadings. "They slaughter him in front of a crowd jeering. I'm looking for support from everyone."
Ibrahim and more than 10 relatives living in Portland were calling on the US government and the United Nations to help them get answers.
The Saudi government had stated in a press release that the six men were executed because they had formed a gang to carjack limousines and beat and loot the drivers.
But the family says Abdul Fattah was not given a reason for his imprisonment, nor did he know any of the other men before he met them in prison.
"They're lying," his sister Hinda Ali Hassan said of Saudi officials. She said that even if the allegations were true, Islamic law punishes theft with the amputation of a hand; the death penalty is meted out for murderers. "What kind of law they follow in Saudi Arabia, I don't know."
Hassan said her brother thought that he may have been imprisoned because he had entered Saudi Arabia illegally, like many other African migrant workers.
Family members in Portland said they spoke with the young man just a week before he was executed. Though he was subject to frequent lashings, he was allowed to buy a cell phone and spoke weekly with a brother who had immigrated to London, his family said.
Relatives said they had no idea that he had been beheaded until Amnesty International called the brother in London. He notified family members in Portland.