Ayed al-Jahdali was convicted of shooting dead a policeman who was trying to arrest him for drug trafficking, the ministry said in a statement carried by the official SPA news agency.
He was executed in the western Mecca region, it said.
Iran on Sunday summoned Saudi Arabia’s charge d’affaires in Tehran after the Gulf kingdom executed three Iranians convicted of drug trafficking, Iran’s official IRNA news agency reported.
London-based Amnesty International says Saudi Arabia had the world’s third-highest number of executions last year, far behind China and Iran, but ahead of Iraq and the United States.
Under the kingdom’s strict Islamic legal code, murder, drug trafficking, armed robbery, rape and apostasy are all punishable by death.
