How Long Shall They Kill Our Workers While We Stand Aside and Look?

At around seven on the evening of October 14, a phone rang in a village in Brahmanbaria. Someone calling from Saudi Arabia told the family of Nazrul Islam, 25, that he had been executed. His 65-year-old aunt collapsed upon hearing the news and died that night.

Only three days earlier, on October 11, Nazrul had called home. The call lasted only two minutes. No one knew it would be their last. Now his mother, Rahima Begum, says the charge against her son is false, and asks to see her son’s body one last time.

Nazrul had spent about three years in a Saudi prison. Riyadh says he and another Bangladeshi, Sweety Akhtar, committed an “immoral act” inside a mosque in Makkah, and that is nearly everything it has told anyone. His family heard the news by phone. 

Bangladesh’s government heard it from a press statement, and its consulate in Jeddah says it was not notified beforehand. Days later, Dhaka still could not confirm who they were.

Justice is supposed to be blind. Saudi justice has perfect eyesight. It reads passports. A poor migrant from a weak country who ends up in a Saudi courtroom meets a different kind of justice from the one a citizen would receive for the same act, or one from a wealthy country.

Does the kingdom punish its own people as harshly for the offences it punishes foreigners for? Does a Bangladeshi or an Ethiopian pay a price that a Saudi accused of the same thing would never be asked to pay?

The state never answers these questions aloud. Instead, the answers appear in the sentences handed down, in trials conducted in a language the accused cannot follow, and in the silences that follow each execution. The outcome seems to depend less on what the accused did than on who they are, and on who is watching.

The Case Against the Condemned

Let’s start with the dock. Riyadh says a court sentenced the two under ta’zir, a discretionary punishment, citing the seriousness of the offence and the sanctity of the place and time. It has not named the offence or the mosque.

It has not said when they were arrested, whether they had a lawyer, or whether anyone told their families. Some outlets call them a couple, but it is not confirmed that they were married to each other. Dhaka’s state minister has said the labour wing of its mission described the case as adultery, but that is a secondhand account, not a charge sheet.

What we know about Nazrul comes mostly from his family. He was the eldest of four children and worked as a cleaner at the Haram in Makkah. He was arrested about eight months after arriving, and his family says he spent about three years in prison.

His mother says the charge is false. Relatives, friends, and the head of his old madrasa told the paper that it does not match the young man they knew.

What the Law Says

Does the sentence fit the law Riyadh claims to follow? Not if we look at Islamic jurisprudence. Classical jurists treated unlawful sex as a fixed-penalty offence and set the bar for conviction extremely high: A voluntary confession or four adult eyewitnesses to the act itself. 

Even slight doubt was enough to avert the penalty, which is why these punishments were rarely carried out for centuries. If the accused were unmarried, the fixed penalty was 100 whiplashes.

If they were married and committed an act of extramarital affair, the classical schools prescribe stoning to death, but only on proof. Riyadh has said nothing to suggest that either standard was met.

So it reached for ta’zir, a discretionary punishment for crimes for which no specific punishment is stated in Islam, and it is left to the judge to specify its type and amount. Usually its penalties run from a reprimand to flogging or imprisonment. 

Using it to leap from an offence the tradition punishes with lashes to execution does not apply the tradition. It turns it upside down. Amnesty International documents how Saudi judges use ta’zir to make punishments harsher, even where no one was killed, despite the Crown Prince’s public claim that the kingdom was limiting the death penalty for ta’zir offences.

And on the public record, Riyadh has not shown that it met the international standards it has signed, such as the Arab Charter on Human Rights, which limits the death penalty to the most serious crimes and guarantees a lawyer and an interpreter.

The Wider Pattern

A weak legal case would matter less if this were a one-off. It is not. Saudi Arabia executed a record 356 people in 2025, 345 in 2024, and 96 more in the first half of 2026. Foreign nationals make up roughly three-quarters of those executed for drug offences. 

The countries involved, from Pakistan and Syria to Nigeria and Ethiopia, are mostly poor or middle-income, not wealthy Western powers. Bangladesh is rarely on these lists. Earlier Bangladeshi executions reported in the press were murder cases, eight in 2011 and two in 2023.

Saudi defenders point out that Saudis are executed too, and that foreigners are 77% of the workforce. Neither answers the real question, which is how people are prosecuted. 

Amnesty found systemic failures in cases involving foreign nationals: Weak access to lawyers, inadequate consular support, poor interpretation, and some reports of torture to extract confessions.

Families heard of executions from other prisoners or the media, and in every case documented, the bodies were withheld. Nazrul’s parents are now asking for nothing more than to see their son’s body once, and there is every reason to fear they will be refused.

Exploitation of Migrant Workers

That is how Saudi Arabia treats foreigners it accuses. The second test is how it treats foreigners who accuse. Foreign workers keep Saudi homes running. Amnesty counts more than four million domestic workers in the kingdom, and they are still excluded from the national labour law. 

In July, Amnesty published the testimonies of 19 Filipino women who described working days of 14 to 21 hours and, in several cases, sexual harassment or assault by male employers or their relatives.

A year earlier, it had documented more than 70 Kenyan women with similar stories. Passports are widely confiscated, and domestic workers cannot legally leave the country without permission, so escaping an abuser means asking him for the ticket home.

Bangladeshi data tell the same story, and the newest figures are this month’s. In the first nine months of 2026, 1,687 women workers came home from abroad, many citing abuse and mistreatment, and 979 of them came back from Saudi Arabia. That counts only the women recorded at the airport welfare desk, because the government has no full count of returnees. 

A research in 2025 study by the Ovibashi Karmi Unnayan Program (OKUP) found that 94% of women who returned involuntarily suffered regular physical and psychological abuse abroad, and nearly half reported sexual harassment. Some women, reportedly, return pregnant after sexual assault, and others return in coffins.

Further figures sharpen the picture. BRAC Migration Program data shows that at least 70,000 women have returned to Bangladesh over the past seven years, most of them alleging various forms of abuse. 

According to the Wage Earners Welfare Board (WEWB), the bodies of 799 female migrant workers were returned to Bangladesh over the past eight years. Most of their death certificates listed suicide as the cause, with the majority of cases reported from Saudi Arabia. Think about that for a moment.

A former Bangladeshi ambassador to Saudi Arabia reported in a letter to the ministry that, on average, three to four workers seek refuge at the embassy every day, facing some sort of abuse.

And what happens to the employers? Riyadh told Amnesty that domestic workers are protected and that every allegation is taken seriously and investigated. Amnesty asked for data on enforcement. Riyadh did not provide it, and Amnesty concluded that the safeguards have been largely insufficient. 

Workers testify, rights groups document, and the state offers assurances and no numbers. So here is a question Riyadh could end tomorrow by answering: How many Saudi employers have been charged, convicted, and punished for raping or beating a domestic worker?

Until it says, the picture is of a system that moved with severity against two foreigners in a mosque and has not shown that it has punished a single citizen for abusing a foreigner in his own home.

A state that will not explain what it does to foreigners, and will not show that it holds its own people to account for what they do to foreigners, cannot be trusted to police itself. It has to be pushed.

Justice that Bends to Diplomacy

Consider a case from the same week. Anojan Sivarasa, a 24-year-old Sri Lankan construction worker, posted a Facebook comment that was insulting to the Prophet. A court gave him five years. 

Then prosecutors appealed to have the case handled under Sharia, and on September 17 an appeals court raised the sentence to death, a decision Amnesty has pointed to as a sign of arbitrariness.

Then Sri Lanka pushed. Its president and ministers got involved, its ambassador visited him in prison, and a delegation of legal experts travelled to Saudi Arabia. On October 13, according to Sri Lankan officials, Saudi Arabia’s Supreme Court set the sentence aside.

He is not free as far as reports show, and the ruling does not mean the case is over. But the arc is clear: Five years, then death, then set aside, all within a few months. The last swing came not from any change in the law but from a government that showed up.

A system that bends to diplomacy is not applying law. It is applying leverage. If justice changes with diplomatic intervention, it is not being applied equally.

Bangladesh did not show up. Officially, it did not know.

A capital trial reportedly ran for months in Jeddah, where Bangladesh has a consulate general, and Dhaka says nobody informed it. Officials are now asking why nobody acting for the two ever contacted the mission.

Yet Nazrul’s family says it learned of his arrest within a month. If Dhaka is telling the truth, then either Saudi Arabia hid a capital case from our consulate, or a case his own family knew about never reached the people paid to act on it. Both are failures, and only one of them is ours to fix.

Under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, Riyadh must tell detained foreigners of their right to consular help and report a foreign national’s death, and it owes Dhaka an answer. But a government that cannot say where its citizens are standing trial has no leverage at all, and Riyadh knows it. 

Dhaka’s response afterwards was hardly better: A note verbale that days later still had no reply, and a state minister who called the case a “major lesson for us” while pointing to Saudi Arabia’s own legal framework. The lesson belongs to Riyadh.

The Leverage Bangladesh Ignores

Bangladesh has more leverage than it uses. More than 3.5 million Bangladeshis work in Saudi Arabia, the largest concentration of Bangladeshi migrant workers anywhere, and last fiscal year they sent home $5.85 billion, about 16% of all remittances. 

Lat year over three-quarters of a million Bangladeshis, nearly two-thirds of all who went abroad for work, went to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, in turn, runs on foreign labour. Expatriates are more than three-quarters of its workforce and are paid on average about a third as much as Saudi workers. The kingdom’s kafala sponsorship system binds 13 million migrant workers to their employers.

The dependence is mutual. Riyadh needs these workers as much as their families need the wages. Dhaka treats access to the Saudi labour market as a favour. It is a trade, and a trade has terms.

Others have set terms.  Indonesia and the Philippines stopped sending domestic workers over abuse complaints before Bangladesh signed its own agreement with Riyadh in 2015.

The Human Cost of Remittance

What would justice look like here? It cannot bring back the two who have been executed. It would look like an answer. Riyadh should publish the judgment, name the charge, answer Dhaka’s note, and give every foreigner facing a capital charge a lawyer, an interpreter, and their consulate before, not after. 

It should tell the world how many employers it has punished for abusing the people who clean its homes. Dhaka should stop calling this a lesson, track its citizens in Saudi custody, and use the leverage that three and a half million workers give it.

Behind every number in this article is a person. Nazrul’s father spent 24 years working in Saudi Arabia and came home no richer. He borrowed 7 lakh taka from relatives to send his eldest son to Makkah. Sweety Akhtar’s father -- a day labourer from Tangail -- sent his youngest daughter abroad on a 1.5 lakh taka loan. 

The loan was still unpaid when they both were arrested. Riyadh treated their lives as disposable. Dhaka treated their deaths as a lesson. Neither treated them as human beings.

Somewhere tonight, another Bangladeshi man is finishing a shift he did not choose in a country that does not care to learn his name. What he has left goes to a mother who needs medicine, a sister who needs a wedding, a child who needs school fees.

Somewhere tonight, a woman is working in a locked house, her phone in her employer’s hands, counting the days until her contract ends.

We call them remittance warriors, and they have earned the title. Their money sustains millions of households and props up the country’s reserves. They carry two countries on their backs. They are not asking for favours. 

They are asking to be seen by a system that only sees their passports. Justice that depends on who is watching is not justice. So let us start watching.

Md. Abrar Galib is a student of Economics at the University of Chittagong. His writing interests include politics, governance, economic affairs, and human rights. He can be reached at [email protected].