suitor Imarul, who uses one name, and four other men were sentenced to hang after being convicted of killing a 14 year old girl whose family spurned his offer of marriage. After the family accepted an offer from another man, Imarul and his accomplices broke into the victim's bedroom as she slept and abducted her, court official Abdur Rahman said.

the US Supreme Court granted a last-minute stay of execution to Robin Lovitt, a man convicted of murder in Virginia, because much of the evidence was accidentally destroyed.

China voiced "resolute opposition" to Australia's decision to grant asylum to Chen Yonglin, a former Chinese diplomat, and dismissed his accusations that he faced execution if repatriated as "lies not worthy of response".

Wang Ching-chan, a Taiwan man, was sentenced to death for poisoning energy drinks with cyanide in a botched extortion attempt that left one person dead.

Belarussian deputy presidential chief of staff Natalya Petkevich said the death sentence might be annulled in Belarus via a national referendum.

two people were sentenced to death for the murder of a Bahraini housewife, Latifa Abdulla Abdulaziz.

Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions raised the alarm over the case of a man who was on death row in northern Nigeria awaiting execution by stoning after a Sharia court found him guilty of sodomy.

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.