There was desperation in the voice of the young Ethiopian man when he managed to get through to the BBC from a phone in his prison cell on death row in Saudi Arabia.
News
Habtom, whose name – like the other prisoner featured in this article – has been changed to protect his identity, has been held in a jail in the southern city of Khamis Mushait for more than three years.
Above the noise of cellmates shouting behind him, he pleaded for help and sounded angry that his government appeared to be doing little to change his fate.
“One prisoner cannot comfort another. We have no choice but to cry. We are waiting for our turn, even though we do not know when it will happen,” said Habtom.
Details
He and some of his fellow inmates had fled war and poverty at home in the hope of finding a better life.
But that quest, which took him through Djibouti and Yemen, led to his incarceration – joining a growing number of Ethiopians in Saudi prisons who face the prospect of execution for drug-smuggling offences.
Anxious to tell their story, some of the prisoners managed to get hold of the mobile phone number for the BBC’s Tigrinya language service. In total we have spoken to seven of the dozens – perhaps as many as 200 – Ethiopians inside the prison who are waiting for a death sentence to be carried out.
Analysis
Other foreigners, including Pakistanis, Sudanese and Jordanians, are in a similar position, but in the first seven months of this year 17 Ethiopians have been executed – the highest number among non-Saudis. Five of those executions happened on Monday.
Two years ago, according to research by Amnesty International, just two Ethiopians were executed, but 35 were put to death in 2025.
It is not clear exactly why there has been an uptick, but it could be linked to more people leaving the northern Ethiopian region of Tigray, where a brutal two-year civil war in Tigray ended in late 2022, leaving devastation in its wake.
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