KUWAIT: SIX EXECUTED, FEMALE CONVICT SPARED AT FINAL HOUR

September 10, 2024:

Kuwait on September 5, 2024 carried out the death sentences issued against six individuals who were convicted of murder, in the first hangings in the country in two years.
A Kuwaiti woman convicted of murdering her friend was saved from the gallows early on September 5 after a last-minute pardon by the victim’s relatives.
The hanged men included two Kuwaitis, three Iranians and a Pakistani. Some of the men were on death row for as long as five years.
Two hours before the woman was supposed to be hanged, relatives of the victim pardoned her before the police, accepting blood money.
The victim’s mother agreed to submit the waiver for KD 1 million. She went to the Central Prison in the evening, just a few hours before the scheduled execution, and formally declared her waiver.
The public prosecutor then halted the execution. The woman was convicted of premeditated murder of her female friend at the victim’s house by stabbing her several times after having breakfast together, in 2016.
The sources revealed that she is a divorced woman with children.
The reason for the murder was not revealed.
Two of the Iranians hanged were convicted of killing a member of the Al-Sabah ruling family, a Kuwaiti man in his 70s and an Indonesian maid in Salwa for robbery. The men committed the crime in 2016 and were handed the final conviction in 2019. Dozens of men and women are on death row as Kuwait has slowed down the pace of executions over the past two decades under pressure from rights groups calling for a freeze on executions.