RIYADH: Saudi health authorities announced yesterday the death of an elderly woman from the MERS coronavirus, bringing the death toll from the respiratory disease in the kingdom to 61.
The 81-year-old, who died from the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome in Riyadh, was suffering from several chronic illnesses, the health ministry website said.
Saudi Arabia, the country worst hit by MERS, has recorded 147 cases, of which 61 have now proven fatal, since the virus first appeared in September 2012.
Experts are struggling to understand the disease, for which there is no vaccine.
MERS is considered a deadlier but less-transmissible cousin of the SARS virus that erupted in Asia in 2003 and infected 8,273 people, nine percent of whom died. The World Health Organisation says it has been told of 182 cases of MERS infection worldwide, including 79 deaths.
Saudi executes tenth convict
this year
RIYADH: A Saudi citizen convicted of murder was beheaded yesterday, the interior ministry announced, bringing the number of executions in the kingdom this year to 10.
Salem Al Jahdali beat fellow tribesman Abdullah Al Jahdali to death following a dispute, the ministry said in a statement published by the official SPA news agency.
The execution took place in the holy western city of Makkah.
The kingdom beheaded 78 people in 2013, according to a count.
Last year, the UN High Commission for Human Rights denounced a “sharp increase in the use of capital punishment” since 2011 in Saudi Arabia.
According to figures from Amnesty International, the number of executions in the country rose from 27 in 2010, of whom five were foreigners, to 82 in 2011, including 28 foreigners.
In 2012, the number of executions slipped slightly to 79 people, among them 27 foreigners.
Rape, murder, apostasy, armed robbery and drug trafficking are all punishable by death under Saudi Arabia’s Islamic Shariah law.
Kidnappers free Czech doctor
in Yemen
ADEN: A Czech doctor was freed several hours after being kidnapped by gunmen in the Yemeni capital Sana’a, security sources said.
The doctor was walking to work at a private hospital when the armed assailants blocked her way with their car and seized her, the sources said. She was the third foreigner to be snatched this month.
Security sources said yesterday the kidnappers later freed the woman unharmed, leaving her on a main road east of the capital, and that she returned home on her own.
The reasons for the kidnapping and the release were not immediately clear.
The incident highlighted the increasing breakdown of security in the US-allied country, which is struggling to restore state authority weakened since mass unrest in 2011 that forced long-serving President Ali Abdullah Saleh to step down.
The kidnapping followed the abduction of a British oil worker by unidentified gunmen and a German seized by Yemeni tribesman to press for the release of their jailed relatives.
An intelligence officer, Colonel Ahmed Hashem, was shot dead on Saturday by suspected al Qaeda militants in Atek in the southern province of Shabwa, a security source said.
Agencies
