the Taliban publicly executed a man for his alleged involvement in a murder case in the Garmsir district of southern Afghanistan’s Helmand province.

two Saudi soldiers were beheaded with a sword after being convicted of drug smuggling, the Saudi interior ministry said.

former security officer Rustam Ibragimov, one of the two key defendants in the murder trial of opposition leader Altynbek Sarsenbaev, was sentenced to death.

Undersecretary of State at the Presidential Chancellery Andrzej Krawczyk has written to Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly head Rene van der Linden that President Lech Kaczynski had not presented any initiative of reintroducing the death penalty in Poland.

an Afghan hitman convicted of murdering a dozen people in south-eastern Iran, was hanged in public.

the state of Ohio executed Darrell Ferguson, a triple murderer who stabbed and stomped his elderly victims and later begged his trial judge to be put to death.

a Sunni extremist convicted of killing a Shia political leader ten years ago was executed in in Pakistan's central Punjab province.

an Iranian man convicted of raping and murdering a young girl was hanged in public in the northern town of Babol, the semi-official Fars news agency reported.

Delara Darabi, 19, has reportedly been sentenced to death for a second time after her case was retried. She is at risk of imminent execution for a murder which took place when she was 17 years old.

a Chinese government official has been executed for spying for Taiwan, and thousands of civil servants have been shown an “educational” video of the case as a warning, two government sources said.

proclaiming his innocence, a former county jail officer was executed for raping and smothering his girlfriend's 3-year-old son.

Human rights activists praised the government's approval of a draft law that would eradicate the death penalty for certain crimes but stressed capital punishment should be abolished completely.