By Muhammad Darwish, Nimi Princewill, CNN
(CNN) — Amanuel wakes up each day not knowing if it will be his last. A rap at his cell door could mean his time is up; no farewell call, no last meal. Executions in Saudi Arabia often arrive without warning.
“I’m a dead man walking,” he says. “After my friends were executed, I don’t eat food, I don’t drink water.”
Amanuel is a pseudonym for one young prisoner who’s been imprisoned for several years. CNN obtained his account from inside Khamis Mushait prison, in the southwest of Saudi Arabia. CNN is not naming him for his own protection.
He is among around 60 Ethiopians sentenced to death on drug-related charges in one cell alone at Khamis Mushait, according to rights groups, with more held in other cells there.
“These are not isolated cases,” said Maya Foa, chief executive of human rights group Reprieve. “There is a clear pattern of Saudi authorities targeting vulnerable migrants. Often, their true ‘crime’ appears to have been crossing the border, in search of a better life.”
CNN has also heard from relatives of three other men held on death row in Saudi Arabia on similar charges. All said they had learned of the arrests only weeks after sentencing, through word of mouth or community contacts, not from Ethiopian or Saudi officials.
“What I’m praying for, and what I need from the world, is to put positive pressure on the Saudi government to reconsider this decision,” said Selam, a sibling of one of the men, using a pseudonym to protect their family. “Please, Saudi government, we beg your mercy to my brother and others in a similar situation.”
A total of 356 people were executed in Saudi Arabia last year, the highest number in recent history, according to Saudi records compiled by NGOs. Of those, 240 had been convicted of drug offenses, most of them foreigners. Two years before that, in 2023, the same monitors recorded two such executions in the entire year. The number executed for non-lethal drug crimes this year has reached 71, with Ethiopians representing the biggest number of foreign nationals.
Taha al-Hajji, a Saudi lawyer living overseas who’s the legal director of the European Saudi Organization for Human Rights, outlined serious concerns about due process in the kingdom.
“Capital trials in Saudi Arabia routinely fail to meet even minimum guarantees of fairness,” he said. “Defendants are denied legal representation and adequate interpretation, leading to migrants being convicted and sentenced to death without understanding the process – often on the basis of torture ‘confessions.’
“This is not justice: it is state violence, inflicted on defenseless people.”
CNN reported in November on a similar case in Saudi Arabia’s Tabuk prison, where an Egyptian fisherman was sentenced to death after being detained on drug-smuggling charges.
Khamis Mushait, where Amanuel is held, holds many stories like his, human rights advocates say.
A job that led to death row
Amanuel says he fled Ethiopia’s Tigray region during the pandemic, in the middle of the country’s civil war, and spent two years stranded in Yemen before eventually crossing into Saudi Arabia. He says he worked there as a shepherd for three months.
When that ended, his employer, a Saudi national, offered him something else, a job moving goods from place to place, and Amanuel says he didn’t think much of it. “The men who offered me the work were Saudi. I trusted them.”
A few years ago, while making a delivery, he tells CNN he was arrested after police found hashish in his vehicle.
“We thought just we were carrying some normal things,” he said.
What came next, he says, was a beating with an electrical cord and kicks to his body. Documents in a language h