No fewer than 520 Ethiopian nationals, sentenced to death for drug trafficking, are currently being held in prisons in Saudi Arabia awaiting execution, the government of Tigray, a province in northern Ethiopia, urging the kingdom’s authorities to show “clemency.”
According to the nongovernmental organization Amnesty International, Saudi Arabia ranks third worldwide in the number of executions carried out between 2022 and 2025, behind China and Iran.
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Agence France-Presse reports that it has counted more than 200 executions in the kingdom in 2026.
Authorities in Riyadh announced on Wednesday that they had executed two Ethiopians convicted of drug trafficking, one week after they had executed five of their compatriots, convicted of the same crime.
Another five were executed in June and the same number in July, bringing the total number of Ethiopian citizens executed this year to 34. This is the highest number of foreign nationals executed by Saudi authorities, according to an AFP tally based on official announcements.
“In Saudi Arabia, 520 Ethiopians have been sentenced to death and are awaiting execution (…) The majority of those detained pending execution are from the Tigray region,” said Hajis Sibagandis, head of the agency responsible for youth affairs in the Tigray government, during a press conference.
“Those sentenced to death were either deceived by intermediaries and lured into drug trafficking or were simply accompanying individuals who were trafficking drugs,” he noted.
“Most were tried without a defense attorney, in a language they do not understand, and without an interpreter,” he added.
The federal government of Ethiopia, which has good relations with the kingdom, should ask Riyadh to “show leniency” and not execute them, Mr. Hayes commented.
The Ethiopian federal government did not respond when Agence France-Presse asked for comment.
Thousands of Ethiopians, traveling along the dangerous “Eastern Route,” which connects the Horn of Africa to the oil-rich Gulf monarchies via Yemen, are heading to Saudi Arabia to find work, typically as unskilled laborers.
The NGO Human Rights Watch (Human Rights Watch, HRW) frequently urges the kingdom to commute the death sentences of dozens of foreigners—particularly Ethiopian citizens—who have been convicted of “non-violent” crimes, primarily drug trafficking.
Riyadh says that the death penalty is necessary to maintain order and assures that it is carried out only after all legal remedies have been exhausted.
In northern Ethiopia, a war raged from 2020 to 2022 between the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and federal government forces, resulting in at least 600,000 deaths, according to an estimate by the African Union.
Hundreds of thousands of people remain internally displaced in the region, where bloody fighting resumed in September. However, the level of violence appears to have subsided in recent weeks.
