Sri Lankan Spared Execution For Deleted Facebook Post in Saudi Arabia, Remains in Jail

It took Anojan Sivarasa about 10 minutes to delete the Facebook comment he later told a judge he wrote in anger. Saudi Arabia almost executed him for it anyway.The kingdom’s Supreme Court set aside the 24-year-old Sri Lankan construction worker’s death sentence on Oct. 13, Sri Lanka’s deputy foreign minister announced the next day. The court did not acquit him, pardon him, or order his release. Mr. Sivarasa is still behind bars, reportedly at Dammam Central Prison. His fate is back in the hands of the Al-Ahsa Criminal Court that convicted him in the first place.A lawyer on the Sri Lankan defense team said the Supreme Court ordered that court to hear the case again within two weeks. A hearing had been set for Oct. 17, yet no public account of its outcome has surfaced since. Sri Lankan lawmaker Faiszer Musthapha told reporters at the time that lawyers were still reviewing the decision. A colleague said on Oct. 18 next steps had yet to be clarified.The Supreme Court has not released its written reasoning, so it is unclear whether the judges ruled out capital punishment or acted on narrower grounds, such as procedure. Sri Lanka’s president, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, has pledged to keep assisting the family until the proceedings are finished.A London-based group that tracks abuses in the kingdom argues it was international attention that turned the case.“The main takeaway from this overturning is that considerable international pressure, including diplomatic measures and media coverage, has made all the difference,” the deputy director of ALQST, Josh Cooper, tells The New York Sun.81 Days to a Death SentenceThe ruling does little for the millions of foreigners like Mr. Sivarasa who work in Saudi Arabia as cooks, cleaners and laborers. A foreign worker whose case gets no press attention and no help from his government has little to fall back on.The dispute began in June, after a video circulated in Sri Lanka showing a man kicking a dog that was following Hindu pilgrims to Kataragama. Another user then insulted a Hindu deity in the comments, according to reports.Mr. Sivarasa, a Tamil Hindu, replied on June 28 in Tamil with a remark about the Prophet Muhammad that some viewers found offensive. He deleted it about 10 minutes later, and posted an apology video.A screenshot, however, reached his employer and Saudi authorities. A family member told Human Rights Watch the employer held him in its office for at least 24 hours before taking him to the Dammam police station, where he was arrested on July 1. He had arrived in the kingdom just 10 months earlier and is his family’s sole breadwinner.On July 27, the Al-Ahsa court convicted him under Article 6 of the Anti-Cyber Crime Law, and sentenced him to five years in prison and a fine of about $800,000, according to court documents the rights group obtained. Amnesty International says he had no lawyer until that first sentencing, and his Sri Lankan lawyers say he pleaded guilty without counsel.Prosecutors appealed. On Sept. 17, the Court of Appeal for the Eastern Region treated the comment as a hadd offense, a category of fixed punishments under Islamic law, and imposed death. On Oct. 5, another prisoner attacked Mr. Sivarasa with a small weapon, injuring his head and face, his family said.In less than two months, his punishment went from a prison term to execution.“In Sivarasa’s case, a five-year prison sentence and a fine were followed by a death sentence on appeal. That is a significant escalation over an online comment, and it raises questions about proportionality and whether people can reasonably understand the consequences of their actions under the law,” an India-based humanitarian writer, Mohammad Tahi Ali, tells the Sun.Mr. Sivarasa was sentenced in a country that has sharply expanded its use of the death penalty. Saudi Arabia executed at least 356 people in 2025, the most ever recorded in a single year. As of Nov. 5, it had executed 205 more this year, according to a tally of official statements.Many of those executed were not Saudi. Foreign nationals accounted for 78 percent of the people executed for drug offenses in 2025, Amnesty found. They included Ethiopian migrants executed for carrying khat, a leaf they can chew legally at home.“Migrants in Saudi Arabia are exceptionally vulnerable, often fleeing violence or economic instability in their home countries. Once arrested, these vulnerabilities are magnified, as they face an alien legal system with little support or consular assistance,” the head of death penalty in the Middle East and North Africa at Reprieve UK, Jeed Basyouni, tells the Sun.“The result is disproportionately harsh sentencing: our monitoring shows that migrant workers have made up over half of the executions in the Kingdom over the last two years.”On Oct. 14, the day after Mr. Sivarasa’s reprieve, Saudi Arabia executed two Bangladeshi nationals, Nazrul Islam Abdul Basir and Siti Akhtar, in the Mecca region. The Interior Ministry said a court had sentenced them to death under ta’zir, the discretionary branch of Islamic punishment, for what it described as immoral acts inside a Mecca mosque.Both had once worked as cleaners, according to a Bangladeshi consular memo. Bangladesh’s consulate learned of the executions from media reports, and Dhaka has asked Riyadh to explain the crime, and the legal process.The killings have kept coming. On Nov. 5, the Interior Ministry announced that five more Ethiopians had been put to death in the southern province of Asir for smuggling hashish.Mr. Sivarasa had something those workers never got: a government that flew lawyers into the kingdom to fight for his life.Sri Lankan Lawyers Lead the Defense Sri Lanka sent a four-member delegation to Saudi Arabia, including two presidents’ counsel and an additional solicitor general, with the private lawyers working without fees. The team filed the appeal online on Oct. 11, and word of the ruling came two nights later.The lawyers argued that Mr. Sivarasa was never told the appeals court had reclassified his case as a hadd offense, even though Article 158 of the Saudi Criminal Procedure Law requires the accused to be informed of the nature of the charge. His recorded confession referred to “our Prophet,” wording a Hindu would not use, suggesting the translator added it.They also argued that a hadd punishment demands certainty, that executing a non-Muslim who insults the Prophet rests on the view of a single Hanbali scholar, and that the cybercrime law already covers insults to religion.Saudi Arabia has no written penal code, leaving judges to apply their own reading of Sharia to many offenses and punishments.Rights advocates say that gap leaves defendants guessing where the line sits.“In the absence of a penal code in Saudi Arabia, judges currently use their interpretation of Islamic law and jurisprudence to determine what constitutes a crime and to impose punishments,” the advocacy director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International USA, Elizabeth Rghebi, tells the Sun.“Such practices allow judges wide discretion in adjudicating cases and leave crimes and punishments vaguely defined, in violation of international human rights law.”What Happens NowCitizens in Saudi Arabia rarely escape harsh penalties for what they post online. Yet an anthropologist who studies Gulf labor migration says foreigners stand on far shakier legal ground.“Saudi Arabia has a track record of persecuting both citizens and foreigners for posts and comments, so this issue is not limited to the foreign workforce at all,” a professor of anthropology at the University of Puget Sound, Andrew Gardner, tells the Sun.“However, foreigners have a much less secure foothold in Saudi Arabian law, and that makes migrant workers more vulnerable to this policing of speech. In general, citizens are more often punished for dissent, while migrants are more typically punished for blasphemy.”The Al-Ahsa judges have several choices. They can acquit Mr. Sivarasa, try him again, or convict him and hand down a new sentence. The original five-year term is not automatically reinstated. Any prison time he receives would normally be reduced by the more than four months he has spent in custody since July 1.Foreign workers who are acquitted or finish their sentences are generally deported. A royal pardon would be a separate path to release. His mother, Yogalakshmi, has said she hopes Saudi authorities will let her son go.Amnesty International is pressing for the same outcome.“Amnesty International continues to call on Saudi authorities to immediately overturn his conviction and release him immediately and unconditionally given his charges stem entirely from his exercise of his right to freedom of expression,” Ms. Rghebi adds.“No one should be imprisoned, let alone face execution simply for expressing their views, even if these are deemed insulting or offensive.”

Sri Lankan Spared Execution For Deleted Facebook Post in Saudi Arabia, Remains in Jail

Sri Lankan Spared Execution For Deleted Facebook Post in Saudi Arabia, Remains in Jail

More from the New York Sun

America Pays Twice What Other Rich Nations Do for Health Care. Can Democrats Fix That?

Iran Executed at Least 47 Women in a Year, While Protester ‘Saved’ by Trump Put on Death Row

Trump Officials Credit Cartel Busts for Reducing Overdose Deaths, but Experts Say It’s More Complicated

Pediatric Units Closing, Leaving Emergency Rooms Unrepared to Save Critically Ill Children

Ukraine Becomes World’s First ‘Post-Antibiotic War’ as Wounded Fighters Carry Superbugs Home

Democrats, Riding High After Midterm Wins, Will on January 3 Confront Reality of Governing

America’s Great Cities Could Soon Face the Violent Riots Plaguing Paris

‘Some Like It Hot’ and the Art of Near Perfection

More from the New York Sun

America Pays Twice What Other Rich Nations Do for Health Care. Can Democrats Fix That?

Iran Executed at Least 47 Women in a Year, While Protester ‘Saved’ by Trump Put on Death Row

Trump Officials Credit Cartel Busts for Reducing Overdose Deaths, but Experts Say It’s More Complicated

Pediatric Units Closing, Leaving Emergency Rooms Unrepared to Save Critically Ill Children

Ukraine Becomes World’s First ‘Post-Antibiotic War’ as Wounded Fighters Carry Superbugs Home

Democrats, Riding High After Midterm Wins, Will on January 3 Confront Reality of Governing

America’s Great Cities Could Soon Face the Violent Riots Plaguing Paris

‘Some Like It Hot’ and the Art of Near Perfection