the semi-official Saudi Ukaz daily said a tribunal in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah had sentenced a Pakistani and an Afghan to death for smuggling heroin into the country.

Saudi Arabia executed Noura al-Faydi, a Saudi woman convicted of stabbing to death another woman and setting her body on fire.

“We take very much into consideration the will of the family of Maria Grazia Cutuli, their requests are very influential,” stated an internal source at the Afghan Supreme Court the day after the arrest of Mohamed Zar Jan, presumed leader of the gang which killed four journalists in Afghanistan in 2001, including the reporter from the Italian daily ‘Il Corriere della Sera’.

an Afghan woman was stoned to death for adultery, police said, the first such incident in Afghanistan since the Taliban's ouster from power.

the Palestinian Authority executed four convicted murderers, officials said, defying international calls to halt capital punishment as part of reforms considered key to securing future Palestinian statehood.

Saudi national Zayed bin Ali bin Saleh al-Thabiti al-Maliki was executed for murdering a compatriot and having illicit sex with women, the Saudi Interior Ministry said. Al-Maliki was executed in Taif, a city in the Western part of the country.

a Bangladesh court sentenced 22 people to death and six others to life in jail for killing Opposition lawmaker Ahsanullah Master. Ahsanullah, a senior member of Bangladesh’s main Opposition Awami League, and a young man were killed when a group of armed men opened fire on a rally being addressed by the politician on May 7, 2004.

two Bangladeshi brothers walked to the gallows together and were hanged simultaneously for the murder of three people.

Indonesian authorities would soon execute two brothers on death row for a premeditated triple murder during a robbery in the island of Sumatra in 2002, Antasari Azhar, chief prosecutor of West Sumatra province, said.

it was reported that a Palestinian teenager on death row in Saudi Arabia on charges of killing her Saudi husband at the age of 13 would walk free within days after her in-laws accepted "blood money".

Kamal Hossain Hawlader, a man convicted of killing his teenage wife with poison after he failed to extract dowry payments from her family, was hanged at a jail in southern Bangladesh.

the African Commission on Human and People's Rights (ACHPR) called on Botswana to end its enforcement of "inhuman and degrading" corporal and capital punishment.