Anger and protests spread after executions

TEHRAN: Iran’s supreme leader warned on Sunday that Saudi Arabia would face “divine revenge” for deciding to execute a cleric, calling the killing a mistake which would “haunt” the Kingdom’s politicians. 

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was joined in his condemnation of Sheikh Nimr al Nimr’s death by neighbouring Iraq’s top authority, Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani, who described the death sentence as an unjust act of aggression. 

Their comments came as protests in Iran on Sunday spread to Bahrain, Pakistan, Kashmir and Lebanon a day after a mob set fire to the Saudi Embassy in Tehran and ransacked it before dozens were arrested.

The demonstrations highlighted fury over the killing of Nimr, a cleric who spent more than a decade studying theology at Iran’s seminaries.

On top of the ongoing wars in Syria and Yemen, Nimr’s execution set several Middle East’s countries further apart from their counterpart in Riyadh.
Nimr, 56, was a force behind anti-government protests in eastern Saudi Arabia in 2011.
He was executed on Saturday along with 46 other activists who the Saudi interior ministry said were involved in Al Qaeda killings. Some were beheaded, others were shot by firing squad. Nimr’s brother, Mohammed, said he had been told the body would not be returned to the family. While sectarian leaders hit out at many countries defended their ally, saying the executions were necessary to confront extremism.

But Khamenei, in a speech to clerics in Tehran, said the killing would not go unanswered. “The unjustly spilt blood of this martyr will have quick consequences,” he said.

“God will not forgive. This scholar neither encouraged people into armed action nor secretly conspired for plots but the only thing he did was utter public criticism rising from his religious zeal.”

Sistani’s remarks were not as strong as Khamenei’s but in a statement he alluded to repercussions.

“The spilling of their pure blood — including of the late cleric Sheikh Nimr al Nimr, may his soul rest in peace — is an injustice and an aggression,” he said.
Nimr was arrested in 2012, three years after calling for the oil-rich Eastern Province’s Qatif and Al Ihsaa governorates to be separated from Saudi Arabia and United with Bahrain.

But the Saudi interior ministry described him at the time of his arrest as an “instigator of sedition”.
A video on YouTube in 2012 showed Nimr making a speech celebrating the death of then-interior minister Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz.

Demonstrations outside the Saudi Embassy and at Palestine Square in Tehran attracted around 1,500 people on Sunday.

Some protesters held pictures of Nimr. Activists erected a street sign bearing Nimr’s name outside the kingdom’s Embassy, but state media said the change had not been approved.

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani had earlier intervened to distance the government from Saturday’s violence at both the embassy and a Saudi consulate in Mashhad, Iran’s second city, which was also set on fire.

He called such demonstrators radicals and while deploring Nimr’s killing said criminality at the diplomatic buildings was “totally unjustifiable”.

Forty-four people were arrested, prosecutors said.
Several small protests took place in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq, including in the southern town of Nasiriyah on Sunday.

The United States and European Union have expressed alarm at the executions, with Washington warning that Riyadh risked “exacerbating sectarian tensions at a time when they urgently need to be reduced”.

France and Germany condemned the executions, voicing concerns about growing tensions in the Middle East.

Saudi Arabia’s interior ministry said the executed men were convicted of adopting the radical “takfiri”
ideology, joining “terrorist organisations” and implementing various “criminal plots”.

An official list included people convicted of involvement in Al Qaeda attacks that killed dozens — Saudis and foreigners — in 2003 and 2004.

Among them was Fares al Shuwail, described by Saudi media as Al Qaeda’s top religious leader in the Kingdom.

“Now we see almost one-third of the 2015 total executed in a single day,” said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad Al Hussein of Saturday’s death sentences. — AFP