making no final statement and keeping his eyes trained on the ceiling, William "Junior" Downs was put to death by lethal injection for the 1999 kidnapping, rape and murder of a 6-year-old South Carolina boy.

Turkish women organizations joined the growing international campaign for Iranian woman prisoner Melek Ghorbany who was sentenced to death by stoning on June 28, by a court in the northwest Iranian city of Urmia after being found guilty of committing adultery.

MPs dropped the death penalty from all but one clause of Bahrain's proposed anti-terrorism law.

Shakarullah Ansari, a native of Uttar Pradesh, India, was hanged till death at 8:15 am Kuwait time on charges of murdering his employer.

the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee has, with a wide majority, adopted a report on relations between the European Union and China which asks Beijing for greater respect of human rights, religious freedom and freedom of information.

four men convicted of serious drug trafficking were hanged in the southeasten town of Zabol. The town is near Iran’s border with Afghanistan and Pakistan, and sits on a major narcotics trafficking route.

a man found guilty of snatching and raping scores of young girls with the help of his wife was hanged in public in the central Iranian city of Isfahan.

the international conference “Promoting human rights and religious freedom in North Korea: where do we go from here?”, organised by Freedom House together with the Transnational Radical Party, was held in Rome.

five people convicted of gang- raping a woman were hanged in the early morning at the district jail in Sialkot, about 125 km north of Lahore, the provincial capital of Punjab, Pakistan, jail Superintendent Abdul Razaq Niazi said.

Derrick O'Brien was put to death by lethal injection for his part in the 1993 gang-rape and murder of two Houston teenagers. O'Brien, 31, was condemned for raping and killing Jennifer Ertman, 14, and Elizabeth Pena, 16, in a Houston park on June 24, 1993.

an Iranian man convicted of murder has been hanged in the western city of Boroujerd in Lorestan province, the official news agency IRNA reported.

it was reported that a prison warden in northeast China was executed for beating and ordering other guards to torture an inmate to death.