Saudi Arabia: 520 Ethiopians await execution for drug trafficking, Tigray government says

Some 520 Ethiopians, sentenced to death for drug trafficking, are currently awaiting execution in Saudi Arabia, the government of Tigray, a region in northern Ethiopia, reported on Thursday, which called for “clemency” from the Saudi authorities.

According to the organization Amnesty International, Saudi Arabia was the third country with the highest number of executions between 2022 and 2025, behind China and Iran. AFP has recorded more than 200 executions in 2026. Riyadh announced on Wednesday that it had executed two Ethiopians for drug trafficking, a week after executing five others for the same crime. Five had already been put to death in June and five in July, for a total of 34 this year, the largest number of foreigners sentenced to death, according to an AFP count based on official announcements.

520 condemned

“In Saudi Arabia, 520 Ethiopians have been sentenced to death and are awaiting execution. (...) Most of the people on death row come from the Tigray region,” denounced Hayish Sibagadis, the head of the Youth Affairs Office of the Tigray regional government, at a press conference. “Those who were sentenced to death were either deceived by intermediaries and lured into drug trafficking, or simply accompanied people who transported drugs,” he explained. “Most were judged without a lawyer, in a language they did not understand and without an interpreter,” regretted this Tigray government executive.

Ethiopia, which maintains good relations with Saudi Arabia, should ask Riyadh to “show clemency and spare their lives,” Mr. Hayish further commented. The Ethiopian federal government did not respond to an AFP request for comment. Thousands of Ethiopians, coming via the perilous “Eastern route” linking the Horn of Africa to the Gulf petromonarchy via Yemen, occupy low-skilled jobs in Saudi Arabia.

The death penalty considered necessary to maintain order

The NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) regularly calls on the kingdom to commute the death sentences handed down against dozens of them for “non-violent” drug-related offenses. Riyadh considers the death penalty necessary to maintain order and ensures that it is only applied after exhaustion of appeals.

Tigray is a region in northern Ethiopia ravaged by a war between 2020 and 2022 which left at least 600,000 dead, according to an estimate from the African Union considered low by many experts. Hundreds of thousands of people are still displaced in Tigray, where bloody fighting resumed at the end of September. However, the violence has eased in recent weeks.