Saudi authorities executed five Ethiopian nationals for drug smuggling on Thursday, the Interior Ministry said, in the third such announcement in recent months, AFP reported.

Source: AFP via The Nigerian News

The five had been convicted of "participating in smuggling hashish into the kingdom", the ministry said in a statement published by the official Saudi Press Agency. They were put to death in Asir, a southern province on the Red Sea coast.

The executions brought Saudi Arabia's total number of executions this year to 205, AFP reported. A record 356 people were put to death in the kingdom last year.

A pattern rights groups have been documenting

Thursday's announcement follows two similar group executions of Ethiopian nationals earlier this year. Human Rights Watch reported that Saudi authorities executed five Ethiopian migrants on July 27 and five others on June 23, all for allegedly smuggling hashish, and said at least 17 Ethiopian nationals had been executed on drug charges in 2026 by late July, with at least 79 more at imminent risk on similar charges.

HRW alleged serious due-process failings in the July cases, saying the men — described as migrants from Ethiopia's Tigray region who had crossed Yemen in search of work — were held for more than three years in the Khamis Mushait detention facility in Asir, were made to sign Arabic-language documents they could not understand, and appeared in only three brief court sessions. Those allegations concern the earlier cases; the Interior Ministry's Thursday statement did not name the five men executed this week or give details of their trials.

Amnesty International reported in June that Saudi Arabia had carried out 96 executions between January 1 and June 22 this year, 61 of them for drug-related offences, and that foreign nationals had borne the brunt of executions for drug offences, frequently after what it called grossly unfair trials.

Why this matters beyond Saudi Arabia

The Gulf states employ millions of foreign workers, including a large Punjabi and Indian workforce in Saudi Arabia, and drug smuggling carries the death penalty under Saudi law — the charge in Thursday's cases, as in the earlier Ethiopian cases, was smuggling hashish, a form of cannabis. Ethiopia's Foreign Ministry said in July that it was in regular contact with the Saudi authorities and was pursuing remedies for Ethiopian citizens facing difficult circumstances; no Ethiopian government reaction to Thursday's executions had been reported by Friday morning.

What happens next: rights groups say dozens more Ethiopian nationals remain on death row in the kingdom on similar charges, so further announcements of this kind are possible. Saudi Arabia does not publish a full official executions list; the running totals come from its individual ministry announcements, tallied by AFP.