Saudi Arabia on Tuesday executed five Yemenis and displayed their bodies in public for killing a national and forming a gang that committed robberies across several towns in the kingdom, the interior ministry said.

The five were executed in the southwestern town of Jizan, bringing the number of people executed in the kingdom this year to 46, according to an Agence France Presse tally.

A Saudi man who had contracted the coronavirus has died, raising the death toll in the kingdom from the SARS-like virus to 16, the health ministry announced on Monday on its Internet website.

"One of the patients who had contracted the virus has died," in the Eastern Region of Saudi Arabia where most of the kingdom's cases have been registered, the ministry said.

Saudi authorities beheaded on Monday a Syrian man after convicting him of drug trafficking, the interior ministry said.

Mohammed Yousuf Ezzeddine was executed in the northern city of Qurayat, near the borders with Jordan, the ministry said in a statement carried by SPA state news agency.

A Saudi man escaped a sentence of paralysis for stabbing and paralyzing another man by offering him compensation, media reported on Sunday, although the authorities have denied issuing the punishment.

The sentence was dropped after the family of Mohammed al-Hazim, 26, accepted one million riyals ($270,000) in compensation from the family of convicted Ali Khawahir, 24, al-Watan daily reported.

Saudi woman Raha Moharrak reached the summit of Nepal's Mount Everest, the world's highest peak, in a first for the conservative Muslim kingdom where women's sports are severely restricted, tourism officials said Sunday.

The 25-year-old reached the 8,848-meter (29,029-foot) summit early Saturday morning with a party of foreign mountaineers and Nepalese guides.

Saudi Arabia's first woman filmmaker, Haifaa Al-Mansour, said her country was becoming "more tolerant and more accepting" as she picked up an award in Cannes on Saturday for her acclaimed film "Wadjda".

The 2012 tale of an impish young Saudi girl who plots to own a bicycle in defiance of a ban has won the hearts of critics and public alike in France, Germany and Switzerland, where it is being distributed.

A new case of the deadly coronavirus has been detected in Saudi Arabia where 15 people have already died after contracting it, the health ministry announced on Saturday on its Internet website.

"One new case of novel coronavirus recorded in the Eastern Region" where most of the kingdom's cases have been registered, said the ministry, which this week created a special web page dedicated to the outbreak.

Several government Internet sites have come under "coordinated and simultaneous" cyber attack, an information security spokesman in the oil-rich kingdom reported on Friday.

The spokesman said among them was the interior ministry website brought down for an hour on Wednesday after being targeted in a so-called denial of service attack from "hundreds of IP addresses in different countries".

A deadly new respiratory virus related to SARS has apparently spread from patients to health care workers in eastern Saudi Arabia, health officials said Wednesday.

The Ministry of Health in Saudi Arabia told world health officials that two health care workers became ill this month after being exposed to patients with the virus. One is critically ill.

A Saudi convicted of murder was beheaded on Tuesday, the interior ministry announced, raising to 40 the number of people executed in the conservative Muslim kingdom this year.

Maneh al-Daen was found guilty of stabbing to death a fellow tribesman, Nasher al-Daen, the ministry said in a statement carried by the official SPA news agency.