the Quang Ninh provincial first instance court, Vietnam, sentenced to death Xom Phon, a 30-year-old Laotian, for trafficking over 70 cakes of heroin and 4,000 tablets of Methamphetamine from Lao to northern Quang Ninh province late in 2005.

Abed Abdulrazzak Kamel, convicted of killing three US Christian missionaries in southern Yemen in 2002, was executed by firing squad. Kamel shot dead a surgeon and two of her colleagues at a Baptist mission hospital in the town of Jibla.

an Afghan court sentenced former spy chief Assadullah Sarwari to death for killing hundreds of people during communist rule, the first such punishment for war crimes after decades of conflict in the country.

the number of executions in China is a state secret, but Liu Renwen, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said he agreed with estimates in academic circles that the figure was likely to be about 8,000 a year.

all death penalty appeals must be heard in an open court from the latter half of this year to better protect human rights, China's chief justice Xiao Yang announced.

a young man from the town of Ardebil, north-western Iran, was hanged in prison.

an Iranian man convicted of rape was hanged in a prison in the northern city of Qazvin, the Etemad Melli newspaper reported.

two Taiwanese nationals convicted of drug trafficking were executed in southern China's Guangdong province after being convicted of possessing 12 kilograms (26.4 pounds) of the methamphetamine ice.

several members of the Arizona House and Senate recently offered apologies to Ray Krone, a former Arizona death row inmate who was freed in 2002 following new DNA tests.

convicted murderers facing the death penalty do not have a constitutional right at sentencing to offer new evidence seeking to cast doubt on their guilt, the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously.

a Pakistani court sentenced 11 militants to death for an assassination attempt on Lieutenant General Ahsan Saleem Hayat in 2004 in which 11 people were killed.

for the first time since taking office in 2001, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo categorically stated that she was for scrapping capital punishment and that she would see to the immediate passage of legislation to abolish the Death Penalty Law.