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This story is from December 7, 2019

Fact Check: Was a rapist in Saudi Arabia shot dead within 5 minutes of being caught?

Video of a man being executed publicly is being shared with a claim that in Saudi Arabia, the rapist of a 5-year-old girl was shot dead within five minutes of being caught, and that he was then hanged at a busy intersection.
Fact Check: Was a rapist in Saudi Arabia shot dead within 5 minutes of being caught?
Key Highlights
  • Video of a man being executed publicly is being shared with a claim that in Saudi Arabia, the rapist of a 5-year-old girl was shot dead within five minutes of being caught, and that he was then hanged at a busy intersection.
  • The video is not from Saudi Arabia but from Yemen. It is more than two years old.
CLAIM
Video of a man being executed publicly is being shared with a claim that in Saudi Arabia, the rapist of a 5-year-old girl was shot dead within five minutes of being caught, and that he was then hanged at a busy intersection.
A loose translation of the Hindi text given by a user who posted the video is, "Rapist of 5-year-old girl in Saudi Arabia was shot dead in public within 5 minutes.
Send this post to as many people that it opens eyes of Indian government.”
Here’s a screengrab of the tweet:
tweet

Note: The visuals of the 45-second-long video are quite disturbing to be reproduced here.
TRUTH
The video is not from Saudi Arabia but from Yemen. It is more than two years old. The man in the video wasn’t shot dead within five minutes of being caught after raping someone. He was sentenced to be executed publicly, 20 months after he committed the crime.
VERIFICATION AND METHODOLOGY
Using keywords ‘rapist executed in public’, we found a news report dated August 14, 2017, published in The Independent.
Titled ‘Yemeni man publicly executed for raping and murdering four-year-old girl as crowd film on smartphones’, the report carried pictures from execution that matches visuals from the viral video that is being shared now with false claims.
The Independent]

As per the report, a Yemeni man convicted of raping and murdering a four-year-old girl was executed in front of onlookers in the capital city of Sanaa.
Hussein al-Saket, 22, was shot several times by a police officer in the city's Tahrir Square. His body was then hanged from the top of a crane for the crowd to see, confirms the report.
We also found another report from Daily Mail UK, in which the mother of the victim says that she finally felt relieved after 20 months.
She said that her family waited 20 months for the execution of their daughter's killer.
“I felt so relieved even after it had taken all this time – one year and eight months ago,” she said.
VERDICT
Times Fact Check has found that the video shared with a claim that a rapist in Saudi Arabia was publicly hanged within 5 minutes of being caught, is actually from Yemen. The rapist was executed 20 months after he committed the crime. The claim is hence false.
End of Article
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