The Executioner’s Tale: A Talk With One of Yemen’s Designated Killers

[Time]

With a toothless grin Saleh Shamsadeen sits in the prison governor's office, right beside the family of an inmate sentenced to death. Clasping his aging AK-47 rifle, he jokes that their lawyer is trying to take his next customer away from him. As one of Yemen's executioners, Shamsadeen, 65, has shot dead at least 300 people on behalf of the state in a 12-year career in one of the country's provincial prisons, far from the more congested urban penitentiaries. That number suggests far more people are being executed than is officially acknowledged. In figures released on Wednesday, Amnesty International welcomed a downward trend in countries carrying out the death penalty, including Yemen. But the country — with at least 28 executions recorded in 2012 — ranks sixth in the world behind China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the U.S., according to the annual report. Executions at the prison in Ibb, Yemen's fifth largest city, take place between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. The prisoner lies facedown on a blue tarpaulin. A doctor with a stethoscope locates the heart through the condemned man's back and marks it with a large dot surrounded by a circle in red pen. The verdict is then read out. A brief pause ensues to allow the family of the person wronged — most likely killed — by the prisoner to decide if they are going to forgive the prisoner. If so, the proceedings will come to a halt. Shamsadeen says, in that event, he swings his gun to the sky and fires off the bullets in celebration. (MORE: The New U.S. Way of War: Killing in the Shadows) If the aggrieved family remains silent, however, Shamsadeen will straddle the prisoner, aim at the dot and circle and fire at least two bullets at point-blank range. On two occasions, he says, it took 10 bullets to kill the condemned. The numbers Shamsadeen cites suggest that executions in Yemen far exceed the Amnesty International figures. Certainly the 2012 statistic of 28 seems small. "I killed 101 people in

Via: TIME GlobalSpin