JORDAN: 15 PEOPLE EXECUTED INCLUDING 10 FOR TERRORISM CONVICTIONS

December 16, 2019:

Jordan executed 15 people on 14 December 2019 including 10 convicted on terrorism charges ranging from an attack a decade ago on Western tourists to the slaying of a writer, a judicial source and the government spokesman Mohammad al Momani said on 14 December. Al Momani said those executed included one man who was convicted of an attack last year on an intelligence compound that killed five security personnel. Another five were involved in an assault by security forces on a militant hideout in Irbid city in the same year that led to the death of seven militants and one police officer, while the rest related to separate incidents that go back as far as 2003.
It was the largest number of people executed in one day in Jordan’s recent history, according to a senior judicial source.
Human rights group Amnesty International condemned the executions by hanging saying they were carried out in “secrecy and without transparency”.
“The scale of today’s mass executions is shocking and it’s a big step backwards on human rights protection in Jordan,” Samah Hadid, deputy director of Amnesty International’s Beirut regional office, told media.
A judicial source said the authorities also executed a gunman who last year shot dead outside a court a Christian writer who was standing trial for contempt of religion after sharing on social media a caricature insulting Islam.
Also among the 10 was a gunman convicted of firing at a group of Western tourists near the Roman amphitheatre in downtown Amman in 2006, killing one Briton and injuring five other people, the judicial source added. The five other executions were for rape and sexual assault.