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In August 2018, scattered online reports, some purporting to be backed by video evidence, claimed that Saudi authorities had executed the prominent Shia human rights activist Israa al-Ghomgham, whose name is also sometimes rendered Esra al-Ghamgam. For example, on 22 August the Fort Russ News, an arm of the Center for Syncretic Studies, wrote: Three days earlier, the Young Journalists Club, a website run by Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, offered the headline Saudi Arabia beheads female activist in public and went on to add: These reports are false. The video shared online on and after 19 August actually showed the execution of Laila Bint Abdul Muttalib Basim, a Burmese woman who was beheaded in Mecca in 2015, despite her having pleaded her innocence to charges that she murdered her stepdaughter, as France 24 reported at the time: Fort Russ News' article has undergone three updates since first being published. As of 29 August, the most recent of those updates noted: On 28 August, the international non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch confirmed that al-Ghamgam was not executed on 19 August, and that she had not even been sentenced to death by that time. Rather, a Saudi prosecutor had recommended the death sentence against al-Ghamgam and five other activists from the country's Shia Muslim minority on a collection of somewhat vague charges, as Human Rights Watch noted: Ali Adubisi, director of the European Saudi Organisation for Human Rights, also refuted reports that al-Ghomgham had been executed in August 2018. Interviewed by Check News, the fact-checking arm of the French newspaper Libération, Adubisi said: Her trial should resume in October [2018]. The prosecutor asked that she be sentenced to death. The judge could decide to go along with the penalty requested by the prosecutor, but he could also choose a different sentence.
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