THE PHILIPPINES. GOVERNMENT SEEKS MERCY FOR DEATH ROW CONVICT IN SAUDI ARABIA

the Philippines asked Saudi Arabia to spare the life of Rey Cortez, a Filipino sentenced to death for murder, the Filipino President Gloria Arroyo's press secretary Ignacio Bunye said. The Foreign Affairs Department was doing what it could to ask the Saudi government for leniency in the case of Cortez, Bunye said in a radio interview. He cautioned that "we recognize that they have their own laws that they have to enforce in that country, and we respect their laws".
"All we can do is ask for leniency," he said. Cortez, who went to work in Saudi Arabia as a welder in a car repair shop, was sentenced to death there in May 2002 for killing a Pakistani taxi driver.
The family of Cortez had made a public appeal to Arroyo to save his life, saying he had stabbed the Pakistani in self-defence. In a long-distance interview aired by ABS-CBN television on Saturday, Cortez appealed to Arroyo to ask Pakistani President Pervez Musharaff to help, by asking the victim's family to accept payment of "blood money" or compensation which would allow him to escape the Saudi death penalty.