Death for the Assassin

"Regard not those killed for the sake of Allah as dead, for they are alive beside him, resplendent in his favor and rejoicing . . ." With those words in homage to the late King Faisal, Radio Riyadh thus ended its announcement that Prince Faisal ibn Musaed, the 26-year-old member of the Saudi Arabian royal family who murdered his uncle, King Faisal, last March 25 (TIME, April 7), had himself been put to death.

After weeks of investigation by Saudi authorities, the execution came swiftly. Loudspeaker vans rumbled through the streets of the Saudi capital one afternoon last week announcing that a sharia (religious) court had found the prince guilty and he would be executed immediately. Within minutes, an estimated 6,000 Saudis streamed into the city's Court of Justice Square facing the Riyadh Mosque. At the appointed hour, the young prince was led, blindfolded, to the square. As he knelt with his hands tied behind his back, one of the sharia judges read him the court's verdict. Immediately thereafter, in keeping with the words of the Prophet Mohammed, "a soul for a soul," the prince was executed in the prescribed manner.

Unmarked Grave. First a security man prodded him in the side with a sharpened stick. Then, as the prince straightened his body in response, the executioner's gold-handled sword flashed, and the condemned man's head rolled from his shoulders. The crowd, silent until that moment, broke into shouts of "Allahu akhbar [God is great]." For 15 minutes the prince's head was displayed on the tip of a spike for the crowd's inspection; eventually an ambulance collected it and the body for burial in an unmarked grave.

At the time of King Faisal's death, the government announced that the prince was mentally deranged--and thus presumably would escape death. After further investigation, however, Saudi authorities concluded that the murder had been the politically motivated act of a sane man. In fact, said Radio Riyadh, the prince had confessed to the assassination, explaining it as an effort to rid Saudi Arabia of the rule of Islam because it stood "in the way of the development of the country."

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