Nassiriya, Iraq: Iraq executed by hanging seven of its citizens convicted of “terrorism”, the head of the health ministry in the southern province of Dhi Qar said on Monday.

Doctor Abdul Hassan Al Jabri said the bodies of the seven men were handed over on Monday to the morgue of the state hospital of Nassiriya, the provincial capital.

They had been tried and convicted on charges of “terrorism”, he said.

In December last year Iraq declared “victory” over Daesh after a three-year war against the terrorists who once controlled nearly one third of the country.

In June, Iraq executed 13 extremists after Daesh claimed responsibility for the murder of eight civilians.

Iraq has repeatedly faced criticism from international human rights groups over the high number of death sentences handed down by its anti-terrorist courts.

In 2017, at least 111 convicts were hanged in Iraq and this year 44 people have been executed. </s> AMMAN — Fifteen men, including 10 convicted of terrorism, were executed by authorities on Saturday, official sources said.

“We have carried out the execution of 15 men who were convicted of acts of terrorism that led to the death of individuals as well as heinous murders and sexual assaults against men, women and children,” Government Spokesperson Mohammad Momani told The Jordan Times.

Momani, also minister of state for media affairs, added: “This is an attempt to bring justice to the victims of those terrorists who threatened our national security. Anyone who will dare engage in terrorist activities against Jordan will face the same destiny.”

The largest in the country’s history, Saturday’s executions were carried out after a long wait since Jordan executed two convicted Iraqi terrorists, Sajida Rishawi and Ziad Al Karboli in February 2015. The two inmates were hanged a day after the release of a video showing the killing of Jordanian pilot Muath Kasasbeh by the Daesh terror group.

Rishawi, who was 44 when she was executed, was convicted by the State Security Court in September 2006 of plotting terror attacks against three hotels in Amman in November 2005, which had left more than 60 people dead and around 90 injured.

Karboli’s death sentence was upheld by the Cassation Court in June 2008 after he was convicted of killing a Jordanian truck driver in Iraq in September 2005, possessing explosives as well as belonging to an illegal organisation, called Tawhid and Jihad, an Al Qaeda-affiliated group in Iraq.

In December 2014, 11 men were executed in a move seen by many as a sign of reinstating the death penalty in the Kingdom. The capital punishment had been frozen in Jordan since March 2006.

Saturday’s executions, carried out at Swaqa Correctional and Rehabilitation Centre started at 4am and ended at 7:45am, said a senior official source, who was part of a government team attending the executions.

“The majority of the executed, clad in red uniforms, were calm, with one asking to pray before being executed and another asking his family to pay his debt,” added the source, who preferred anonymity.

The hangings were carried out without trouble, according to the source. “We did not face any issues with the convicted or the procedure itself,” he told The Jordan Times.

“The executions are carried out after the Cassation Court upholds the State Security Court’s and Criminal Court’s rulings. Afterwards, the file is sent to the Cabinet for endorsement. Finally, a Royal Decree has to be issued to approve the execution,” the source explained.

Before any execution is carried out, “the attorney general reviews the files for one last time to make sure procedures are correct, and that there has been no last minute settlement between the victims’ families and the defendant”, which automatically leads to cancelling the death punishment and replacing it with a prison term.

Asked by The Jordan Times if more executions were scheduled, Momani declined to comment but stated that “justice will eventually prevail on those who commit murders and terrorist acts”.

Less than 100 people, including around 10 women, are currently on death row in Jordan, according to the minister.

The issue of capital punishment has drawn a heated debate in Jordan between activists who oppose the death penalty, and officials and lawyers who believe it should stay, supported by a broad section of the public opinion.

Saturday’s executions were met with strong objection and dismay by international organisations.

Human rights group Amnesty International described the executions in a statement as “horrific and shocking”.

“The horrific scale of these executions and secrecy around them are shocking,” said Samah Hadid, deputy director at Amnesty’s Beirut regional office.

“This is a major step backwards for both Jordan and efforts to end the death penalty — a senseless and ineffective way of administering justice. Jordan had for years been a leading example in a region where recourse to the death penalty is all too frequent,” the Amnesty statement said.

“There is no evidence that the death penalty addresses violent crimes, including terrorist-related acts. Hanging people will not improve public security,” the statement added.

Amnesty International opposes the death penalty at all times and regardless of who is accused, the nature of the crime, guilt or innocence or the method of execution, the statement said.

Meanwhile, many Jordanians hailed the executions on social media.

Munir Issa commented on Facebook following the execution, saying it was “well-deserved”.

Dua Hanafieh also praised the executions on Facebook, saying it was the right thing to do for anyone who would kill a man, woman or a child and “threaten the safety and security of our society”. </s> AMMAN, Jordan – Jordan hanged 15 inmates at dawn Saturday, including 10 who were convicted of terrorism, in what officials are calling one of the largest executions since the country reinstated the death penalty two years ago.

The other five prisoners were found guilty of major criminal offenses, including incest and rape, government spokesman Mohammed al-Momani told state-run Petra news agency.

Among those executed were five prisoners charged in last year’s assault on a Jordanian intelligence agency office in the Baqaa refugee camp that left five dead and in an attack against security forces in the northern city of Irbid.

The other convicted inmates were responsible for separate attacks and bombings dating to 2003, Petra news agency reported.

Samah Hadid, deputy director at Amnesty International’s Beirut regional office, said, “The horrific scale and secrecy around these executions is shocking.”

“There is no evidence that the death penalty addresses violent crime, including terrorism-related offenses.”

The men were hanged at a correctional center south of Amman.

Jordan had previously imposed a nine-year moratorium on the death penalty. It was lifted in January 2015.

The government says it has a zero tolerance policy when it comes to terrorism or even perceived sympathy for terrorist groups — even voicing support for such groups is an offense punishable with jail time. </s> Jordan hanged 15 death row prisoners including convicted “terrorists” at dawn on Saturday, its information minister said, in a further break with a moratorium on executions it observed between 2006 and 2014.

Ten of those put to death had been convicted of terrorism offences and five of “heinous” crimes including rape, Mahmud al-Momani told the official Petra news agency.

The attorney general for Amman district, Ziad al-Dmour, said the executions represented “a clear message to anyone who tries to undermines the security of the nation”.

Amnesty International, however, expressed shock at the hangings of 15 prisoners — the largest number to be put to death on a single day in Jordan.

“The horrific scale and secrecy around these executions is shocking,” said Amnesty’s deputy director at the group’s Beirut regional office, Samah Hadid.

Momani said all those executed were Jordanians and were hanged in Swaqa prison, south of the capital Amman.

Among the terrorism offences were a 2006 attack on tourists at Amman’s Roman amphitheatre that killed a Briton and a June 2016 attack on an intelligence service base north of the capital that left five agents dead.

They also included the September 2016 murder of Christian writer Nahed Hattar as he stood trial for publishing a cartoon deemed offensive to Islam.

King Abdullah II had said in 2005 that Jordan aimed to become the first Middle Eastern country to halt executions in line with most European nations.

Courts continued to hand down death sentences but they were not carried out.

However, public opinion blamed a rise in crime on the policy and in December 2014 Jordan hanged 11 men convicted of murder, drawing criticism from human rights groups.

Opinion hardened after the murder by the Islamic State (IS) group of captured Jordanian pilot Maaz al-Kassasbeh whose plane had crashed in a jihadist-held region of Syria in December 2014 while serving with a US-led coalition.

Grisly footage posted in February the following year of him being burnt alive in a cage outraged the public.

Swiftly afterwards, Jordan hanged two people convicted of terrorism offences, one of them Sajida al-Rishawi.

She had taken part in a 2005 suicide attack on luxury hotels in Amman organised by IS’s forebear, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, but her explosives failed to detonate.

According to judicial sources, 94 people remain on death row in Jordan, most of them convicted of murder or rape, following Saturday’s executions.

Dmour, the Amman attorney general, said executions were “the fate of all those who carry out criminal offences”.

But Amnesty International warned that the death penalty was not the way to improve security.

“This is a major step backwards for both Jordan and efforts to end the death penalty – a senseless and ineffective means of administering justice,” Hadid said in a statement.

“Jordan had for years been a leading example in a region where recourse to the death penalty is all too frequent… Hanging people will not improve public security,” Hadid added.

Jordan, which hosts hundreds of thousands of refugees from the conflict in Syria, carries out air strikes on IS in both Syria and Iraq as a member of the US-led coalition.

The pro-Western kingdom fears a spillover of the jihadist threat and closely monitors thousands of Jordanians suspected of being IS or Al-Qaeda sympathisers.

In June 2016, a car bomb at a crossing from Syria, claimed by IS, killed seven Jordanian security personnel. Amman has responded by sealing the border. </s> TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran executed eight men convicted over the 2017 Islamic State attack on parliament and the shrine of the Islamic Republic’s founding ayatollah, the bloodiest terror attack to strike Tehran in decades, authorities said Saturday.

The June 7, 2017 attack has so far been the only assault by the Sunni extremists inside of Shiite Iran, which has been deeply involved in the wars in Iraq and Syria where the militants once held vast territory. IS has since have been beaten back by Iranian-aided Shiite militias in Iraq, as well as by a U.S.-led coalition operating in both countries, though Iran has made other arrests involving the group in the time since.

The judiciary’s official Mizan news agency announced the executions Saturday morning, but did not say when or where they took place. The head of Tehran’s Justice Department, Gholamhossein Esmaili, told Iranian state television that authorities conducted the executions days earlier but chose not to immediately announce them, likely as a security measure.

Executions in Iran are carried out by hangings.

Mizan noted in its report that the executions came after the eight men had been tried and convicted in a trial that included both eyewitness testimony and video footage showing their involvement by providing the attackers support in the days leading up to the assault.

“These eight worked directly … in martyring and wounding a number of innocent compatriots,” Mizan said.

The news agencies on Saturday named those executed as Soleiman Mozafari, Esmail Sufi, Rahman Behrouz, Majed Mortezai, Sirous Azizi, Ayoub Esmaili, Khosro Ramezani and Osman Behrouz. Over a dozen others remain on trial over the attack.

While Iran is one of the world’s top enforcers of the death penalty, such mass executions are rare. In August 2016, human rights activists criticized Iran for carrying out the mass execution of 20 convicted Sunni militants from a group identified as Jihad and Tawhid after a six-year trial. In August 2007, Iran hanged seven men convicted of rape in Mashhad at the same time.

The June 2017 Islamic State attack killed at least 18 people and wounded more than 50. It saw gunmen carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles and explosives storm the parliament complex where a legislative session had been in progress, starting an hours-long siege.

Meanwhile, gunmen and suicide bombers also struck outside Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s mausoleum on Tehran’s southern outskirts. Khomeini led the 1979 Islamic Revolution that toppled the Western-backed shah to become Iran’s first supreme leader until his death in 1989.

The assault shocked Tehran, which largely has avoided militant attacks in the decades after the years-long tumult surrounding the Islamic Revolution. The image of a child being passed out of a window at parliament under the watch of armed security forces remains seared in the minds of many.

Iran’s security forces responded with heavy force. Authorities arrested suspected IS militants, including their wives. In August 2017, Iran’s Intelligence Ministry said it detained 27 militants linked to the Islamic State group who planned to attack holy Shiite cities within the country.

Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard responded to the attack by launching six ballistic missiles into eastern Syria targeting IS militants. It marked the first time Iran had fired its missiles in anger since its 1980s war with Iraq.

That raised new concerns in the West about its ballistic missile program amid the unraveling of its nuclear deal with world powers. That deal is now in danger of collapse with America’s withdrawal from the accord. Economic problems, water scarcity and other woes meanwhile have led to protests in Iran.

Iran remains one of the world’s top executioners. It was second only to China in 2017 in the number of known executions carried out, conducting over 500 hangings, according to Amnesty International.

The IS executions come as controversy still swirls in Iran around the country’s mass executions of 1988 near the end of the Iran-Iraq War. Activists at the time said Iran executed as many as 5,000 people after sham trials of Communists, Kurdish separatists, political prisoners and members of an Iranian exile group known as the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq.

Those executions represent one of the darkest moments of Iran’s post-revolution history and are still not recognized by its government.

Copyright © 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, written or redistributed. </s> Jordan on Saturday (4 March) executed 10 men convicted of terrorism-related offences in one of the biggest rounds of executions carried out since the country launched a major crackdown against Islamic extremists more than two years ago.

Another five people were also executed on the same day for other crimes, including rape, government spokesman Mohammed Momani said in a statement carried by the state news agency Petra. Death penalty was restored in Jordan after a moratorium on it ended in 2014.

Momani said that the men were hanged at Swaqa Prison in central Jordan. He added that the convictions of the 10 men were related to five terrorist incidents that took place in the country – one was a 2003 bombing attack on Jordan's embassy in Iraq. The latest was the shooting of a high-profile writer in the Jordanian capital of Amman in September 2016.

A shooting attack in 2006 on a group of tourists at a Roman theatre in the centre of Amman and the killing of a British man were two other incidents connected to the convictions and subsequent executions, the Associated Press wrote.

Jordan is one of the active members of the US-led coalition group that is currently taking part in the fight against terror outfit Isis in Iraq and Syria. The coalition is assisting local ground forces in the two Middle East nations to drive out the militants from their countries. </s> The latest news of mass death sentence shocked the world; Iraqi courts have sentenced to death a total of more than 300 people, including many foreigners, for belonging to the Islamic State group, judicial sources reported Wednesday.

The suspects are being attempted by two courts, one near the former jihadist stronghold of Mosul in northern Iraq and another in Baghdad which is dealing notably with foreigners and women.

Since January in the capital, 103 foreign nationals have been condemned to death — including six Turks sentenced on Wednesday — and 185 to life in prison, according to a judicial source.

Most of the women sentenced were from Turkey and republics of the former Soviet Union.

In January, an Iraqi court condemned a German woman to death sentence after proving her guilty of belonging to Islamic State while on Tuesday a French woman was sentenced to life in prison.

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At the court in Tel Keif near Mosul, 212 people have been sentenced to death, 150 to life in prison and 341 to other jails terms, Supreme Judicial Council spokesman Abdel Sattar Bayraqdar said in a statement.

Iraq declared victory in December against Islamic State which at one point controlled a third of the country.

11 people accused of terrorism-related charges had been executed in Iraq, which according to New York-based Human Rights Watch is the world’s number fourth executioner ever, the justice ministry reported, on Monday. </s> Jordan on Saturday executed 10 men convicted of terrorism charges, including deadly attacks on tourists, Jordanian security forces and a local writer, the government spokesman said.

It was the largest round of executions since pro-Western Jordan launched a crackdown on Islamic extremists two years ago, following the killing of a captured Jordanian fighter pilot by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).

Jordan is a part of a US-led military coalition against Isil, which holds territory in Syria and Iraq.

The men were hanged at dawn Saturday at Swaqa Prison in central Jordan, government spokesman Mohammed Momani said in a statement carried by the state news agency Petra.

Five others were executed for other crimes, including rape, he said.

“The horrific scale and secrecy around these executions is shocking," Samah Hadid, Deputy Director at Amnesty International’s Beirut regional office, said. “This is a major step backwards for both Jordan and efforts to end the death penalty – a senseless and ineffective means of administering justice.

"Jordan had for years been a leading example in a region where recourse to the death penalty is all too frequent."

Mr Momani said the assailants executed Saturday for terror convictions had been involved in five different incidents, from a 2003 bombing attack on Jordan's embassy in Iraq to the September 2016 shooting of outspoken writer Nahed Hattar in the Jordanian capital of Amman.

Also listed was a 2006 shooting attack on a group of tourists at a Roman theatre in the center of Amman. A British man was killed in the attack. </s> An Iraqi court has given the death penalty to a man who acted as a legislative judge in Mosul for the Islamic State (IS) when the group was in control of the city, said a judicial spokesman on Thursday.

The defendant, whose name was not specified, was reported to have been in charge of marriage contracts in Mosul and surrounding areas.

"The Nineveh Criminal Court sentenced an Islamic State militant to death,” said Abdul Sattar al-Birqdar, spokesperson for Iraq's Higher Judicial Council, in a statement. “The convict used to work as a judge in the marriage contracts court, within the so-called legislative courts of Islamic State in Mosul.”

One day before, al-Birqdar and another judicial official announced that, since the beginning of the year, over 300 suspects have been handed death sentences for crimes related to IS membership.

The cases, being heard in federal courts in Baghdad and Nineveh provinces, also resulted in several hundred lesser sentences, including life imprisonment.

The rise of executions in the country has led the UN mission in Iraq, the EU, and international human rights groups to criticize Iraq for a lack of transparency in its courts.

"These executions follow rushed trials of ISIS suspects which are riddled with due process violations, including convictions based solely on confessions which are sometimes extracted by torture," said HRW senior Iraq researcher Belkis Wille in a press release on Tuesday.

The death penalty in Iraq was suspended on June 10, 2003, but was reinstated the following year. Critics say that the country's flawed and confession-based criminal justice system in which torture is routinely used to extract confessions is incompatible with so final a sentence as capital punishment.

Iraq's Justice Ministry announced on Monday that it had executed 13 convicted prisoners, 11 of them over charges of terrorism.

Last year, Iraqi forces arrested tens of thousands of those accused of being Islamic State (IS) members and affiliates, most of whom await sentencing.
Iraq announces the executions of seven terror convicts in Dhi Qar, saying the men, all citizens of Iraq, were hanged yesterday.