A Sri Lankan migrant worker in Saudi Arabia has been sentenced to death for a Facebook comment he made, deleted, and apologized for.
Anojan Sivarasa, 24, was arrested on July 1, and first received a five-year prison sentence, which was the maximum under the anti-cybercrime law, and a fine.
Prosecutors appealed the sentence and asked for it to be tried under Sharia law instead of the cybercrime law, and the appeals court on September 17 found Anojan guilty of “insulting the Prophet” and sentenced him to death as a hadd punishment, which is a fixed, mandatory punishment under Sharia. Anojan has appealed.
The whole thing started when a video of a young Muslim man kicking a dog that was following a group of Hindu pilgrims in Sri Lanka was posted online in late June. The video sparked a heated argument, with someone posting derogatory remarks about a Hindu deity, and Anojan responding with a comment that was insulting to the Prophet Muhammad.
He deleted the comment and posted a video apology. But someone took a screenshot of the comment and sent it to his employer and Saudi authorities. People in Sri Lanka, therefore, became the informants in this case.
“People in Saudi Arabia knew nothing about this matter. It was individuals in Sri Lanka who sent emails to the company where my brother worked,” Anojan’s brother, Hamsidan Sivarasa, said.
Amnesty International said that Anojan was denied a lawyer from the time of his arrest until he was first sentenced, and that he has not had any contact with his family since September 28.
Anojan’s mother, Rasamanickam Yogalakshmi, is pleading for mercy, saying, “I plead for mercy for the wrongs committed by my son. Please forgive him and send him back to us.”
No execution date has been announced in Anojan’s case, and his family has pleaded with the Saudi authorities to show mercy and pardon him.
Sri Lanka’s President Anura Kumara Dissanayake met with Anojan’s family and promised to do everything in his power to help him, and a four-member legal team from the country is traveling to Saudi Arabia.
In the meantime, Buddhist and Hindu religious leaders in Sri Lanka have asked the authorities there to intervene and help Anojan.
Amnesty International has condemned the sentence, with Heba Morayef saying that “no one should be imprisoned, let alone face execution simply for expressing their views, even if these are deemed insulting or offensive.”
“Sentencing a man to death over a social media post is a chilling illustration of the Saudi authorities’ willingness to impose this cruel and irreversible punishment, including for acts that should never be criminalized,” Morayef said.
At least 175 people had been executed in Saudi Arabia this year as of October 5, including at least 94 foreign nationals, according to Amnesty. The human rights group also noted that the country has no written penal code, and that this allows judges to interpret and hand down sentences based on their own understanding of Islamic law.
In 2025, Reclaim The Net reported about a British citizen, Ahmed al-Doush, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison over a tweet he had deleted. The tweet was posted from an account with only 37 followers.
In 2022, we reported about Salma al-Shehab, who was initially sentenced to three years in prison for retweeting posts by Saudi dissidents, but saw her sentence increased to 34 years on appeal.
In 2023, a retired teacher, Mohammed al-Ghamdi, was sentenced to death over social media posts, but the sentence was later reduced to 30 years in prison.
The case is yet another example of the Saudi authorities’ extremely harsh treatment of people who they perceive as having committed acts of blasphemy, but also of the way they track down those people, even if they are not citizens of the kingdom, and even if they have tried to make amends for their actions.
