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The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has reached a staggering milestone in 2025, concluding the year with 356 state-sanctioned executions. This figure, verified by international monitors and local tallies, officially crowns 2025 as the deadliest year in the country’s modern history, far surpassing the previous record of 345 set just a year prior. While the Ministry of Interior maintains that these measures are essential for "maintaining public order," a deeper investigation into the Kingdom’s internal safety data reveals a startling paradox: despite the unprecedented number of deaths, organized drug trafficking and sophisticated financial fraud are hitting record highs.
The Failure of Capital Deterrence in the Captagon Era
The surge in capital punishment is inextricably linked to Riyadh’s intensified "War on Drugs," a campaign that accounted for 243 of the 356 deaths this year. Despite the resumption of the death penalty for narcotics in late 2022, the flow of illicit substances into the Kingdom has reached an all-time high. Recent data from the UNODC and regional security reports indicate that Saudi Arabia remains the world’s largest consumer market for Captagon.
Even after the fall of the Assad regime in Syria in December 2024—which briefly disrupted production—new non-state entrepreneurial networks have quickly filled the void. In 2025, international security operations intercepted record-breaking shipments, including over 200 million pills seized in the first few months of the year alone. This suggests that the "deterrent" of the death penalty is being ignored by smuggling syndicates who view the high risk as a mere cost of doing business in a high-reward market.
Shifting Criminal Landscapes and the Rise of "Invisible" Crime
While Saudi Arabia often ranks high on global "perceived safety" indices due to low rates of petty street crime, the 2025 Global Organized Crime Index tells a more complex story. Organized crime resilience in the Kingdom has shifted, with a notable increase in "white-collar" offenses. Financial crimes, including embezzlement, tax evasion, and sophisticated AI-driven cyber-fraud, have consolidated as major threats to the Kingdom’s digitizing economy. Analysts suggest that the state’s singular focus on drug-related executions may be creating a "blind spot" for these emerging criminal sectors. These "invisible" crimes pose a systemic threat to the long-term stability of the Vision 2030 agenda by undermining investor confidence and digital security—challenges that cannot be solved through traditional punitive measures.
The Foreigner Burden and the Legal Perspective
For the first time in history, 2025 saw more foreign nationals executed than Saudi citizens. This demographic shift has sparked significant diplomatic tension, particularly with nations like Pakistan, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Somalia, whose citizens are often caught as "mules" or "victims of trafficking" rather than high-level kingpins. Legal researchers argue that the spike in executions is a symptom of a judicial system that relies heavily on discretionary rulings. This lack of transparency means that while the state uses the ultimate penalty to signal "toughness," the root causes of crime—including poverty among migrant communities and the massive domestic demand for stimulants—remain largely unaddressed, allowing the cycle of crime to continue despite the high human cost.
The Vision 2030 Contradiction
The record-breaking execution tally places the Kingdom's leadership in a delicate position as it prepares to host the 2034 FIFA World Cup and courts global tourism. The strategy of using maximum penalties to enforce order is increasingly at odds with the "open and tolerant" brand the Kingdom is spending billions to promote. As 2026 begins, the central question for Riyadh is no longer just the number of executions, but why the ultimate penalty is failing to curb the growth of the very criminal syndicates it intends to destroy.
