Good Friend, a support organization for North Korea with news from internal sources, revealed that on May 17th and 19th, public executions were administered on the riverbanks of the Susung creek next to the Sunam market in Chongjin.

Kyrgyzstan's Supreme Court sentenced to death Otabek Akhadov, an Uzbek citizen, after he was found guilty of several murders connected to what officials describe as an ethnic-Uighur extremist group active in neighbouring China, the man's lawyer Nina Zotova said.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo signed a law abolishing the death penalty on the eve of her trip to the Vatican, but vowed she will not relent in battling terrorists and criminals.

a United Arab Emirates appeal court commuted to imprisonment a sentence of death by stoning handed down by a lower court against a Bangladeshi convicted of adultery. The court ordered Shaheen Abdel Rahman jailed for a year and then deported to his home country.

a senior Vatican cardinal was quoted as saying that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein should not be executed because all life is sacred.

the Manila Regional Trial Court, the Philippines, imposed a death sentence on eight men after finding them guilty of kidnapping a 12-year-old Chinese-Filipino student and his maid on March 15, 1999.

press reports said that two men convicted on charges including murder, organised crime and assault were hanged in public in Iran.

an Iranian man convicted of murder was publicly hanged in the southern city of Shiraz.

the Islamic shari'ah Ifka Halan court executed Ilmi Ba Hasan Adow, convicted of murdering a man in Afgooye, southern Somalia.

the death penalty handed down in Yemen to cleric Yahia Hussein al-Dailamiwas commuted into a term of imprisonment by President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

dissident groups in Cuba asked Havana to grant a general amnesty to political prisoners and to introduce a legal moratorium on capital executions.

“Our Hands Off Cain is also valid for Saddam: thus, ‘hands off Saddam’, which does not equate to non-punishment, but physical wellbeing and human dignity”, stated Secretary and Treasurer of Hands Off Cain Sergio D’Elia and Elisabetta Zamparutti in commenting the prosecutors’ death penalty requests for the former Iraqi dictator.