Seven men have been sentenced to death for raping a disabled boy in Kuwait and threatening to leak footage of the horrifying assault on social media.
The sick thugs, aged between 18 and 23, abducted the ten-year-old victim last September and took him to a chalet where they sexually assaulted him.
The convicts, four Kuwaitis, a Yemeni, an Iraqi and a stateless person, filmed part of the rape and threatened to post it on social media if the boy spoke of his ordeal.
A Kuwaiti appeals court on Wednesday sentenced the men to death, the victim’s lawyer Ibrahim al-Bathani said.
He told AFP that the court overturned a 10-year jail term handed in April by a lower court against the seven accused.
The victim is a Kuwaiti citizen and has a partial mental disability, Bathani said.
‘This is a historic verdict,’ he added.
Prosecutors found the sickening videos on the phones of some of the defendants.
The ruling is not final as the case must go to the Kuwaiti supreme court whose verdicts are final.
The death penalty in Kuwait is carried out by hanging.
Kuwait resumed executions in 2013 after a moratorium of six years. In April 2013, authorities hanged three men convicted of murder.
Two months later, two Egyptians, convicted of murder and abduction, were executed.
One of them, Hajjaj Saadi, was convicted of abducting and raping 17 children below the age of 10. He denied the charges in court.
Kuwait has executed 74 men and six women since it introduced the death penalty in the mid-1960s. Most of those condemned have been murderers or drug traffickers.
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