Pat Dollard

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Wow, talk about stone age…

The Saudi Arabian king today faced international outcry over the planned beheading of a woman accused of being a witch.

Fawza Falih turned two men impotent, a court heard in the ultra-religious state where “performing supernatural occurrences” is considered an offence against Islam.

Judges were also told she cast a spell to bring about the return of a divorced man’s ex-wife.

But international charity Human Rights Watch said King Abdullah’s religious police had forced a confession out of her.

And they claim the judges who tried her in the northern town of Quraiyat never gave her the opportunity to prove her innocence in the face of “absurd charges that have no basis in law.”

The court also relied on the statements of witnesses who said she had “bewitched” them to convict her in April 2006, according to HRW.

Fawza later retracted her confession in court, claiming it was extracted under duress, and said that as an illiterate woman, she did not understand the document she was forced to fingerprint.

An appeals court ruled in September 2006 that Fawza could not be sentenced to death for witchcraft as a crime against God, because she had retracted her confession.

After that, the lower court judges re-sentenced her to death on the court’s “discretionary” basis, for the benefit of “public interest” and to “protect the creed, souls and property of this country.”

HRW’s Joe Stork said: “The fact that Saudi judges still conduct trials for unprovable crimes like ‘witchcraft’ underscores their inability to carry out objective criminal investigations.