Wailing relatives ran after the trucks, which sped off to an execution ground on the city's outskirts. The executions were not public, but China usually puts people to death by pistol shot to the chest or back of the head. Such rallies are common in China, though this one in August 1996 in the southern city of Shenzhen was unusual because a foreign reporter, from The Associated Press, witnessed it. China was one of 28 nations that executed people last year as punishment for crime, according to Amnesty International. The human rights group, which opposes the death penalty, says four countries have given it up since 1991.
Methods vary, from hanging and firing squad to beheading by sword in Saudi Arabia.
Amnesty counted 1,457 executions last year, but says the real number is likely much higher. It says at least 1,000 were executed in China. This year's count will include Timothy McVeigh, scheduled to die Monday by injection for bombing a federal building in Oklahoma in 1995, killing 168 people. Guatemala broadcast the execution of Amilcar Cetino Perez and Tomas Cerrate Hernandez on live television last June. The pair were sentenced to death for the 1997 kidnapping and murder of an elderly heir to a liquor distillery fortune.