At least 50 convicted drugs criminals have been executed this week in China to mark Wednesday’s international anti-drugs day, state media reports said, with scores of others handed suspended death sentences or jail terms.
Sixteen drug traffickers were executed on Monday in the southeastern city of Fuzhou, Fujian province following a mass sentencing rally which dealt with more than 1 200 narcotics smugglers, the Xinhua news agency said.
Among these were 263 people given jail terms of at least five years, the report said.
Fourteen people were sentenced to death in southwestern Sichuan province on Tuesday, of whom nine were immediately taken to the execution grounds and shot, the China News Service reported.
The sentencing took place at a rally at the Shuangliu county sports ground in the provincial capital of Chengdu, where local authorities also incinerated 40kg of drugs, it said.
The remaining five were given a two-year reprieve on their death sentences, the report said. In China this usually means the punishment is commuted to life in prison.
”In recent years in Chengdu, drug crimes have been on the rise and the drug situation is becoming serious as drug criminals are linking up with criminals outside the province,” the report said.
The executions were part of police and judicial activities carried out nationwide in observance of Wednesday’s International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking.
In Hengyang, central Hunan province, seven people were executed for criminal gang activities, including trafficking heroin from Myanmar on China’s southwestern border, to the provinces of Hunan and Guangdong from 1994 to 2000, the Legal Daily said.
Also on Tuesday, three people were executed for drug trafficking in southern Guangzhou, three in central Henan, three in Shanghai and two in Beijing, the daily reported.
And over the past week, a further seven were executed in the eastern province of Jiangsu during another mass sentencing rally, the Yangzi Evening News said.
Trials, police rallies and public drug burnings were also held in the provinces of Yunnan, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Jilin, Heilongjiang, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, the People’s Court Daily said.
Many convicted drug traffickers were sentenced, with two handed the death penalty in Heilongjiang, and ”a group” sentenced to death in both Tianjin and Henan, it said.
China has a famously draconian legal code, with particularly tough penalties reserved for those who deal in, or smuggle, illegal drugs.
Emphasising this, on Wednesday Xinhua reported that a teenager ad been sentenced to death for selling amphetamine pills worth only 150 000 Yuan ($18 000).
Chen Chunyan (18) from Quanzhou city in Fujian, was caught trying to sell 1 000 pills to undercover officers.
China does not publish statistics on executions numbers, but it is widely believed to execute many more people each year than the rest of the world combined.
Rights group Amnesty International documented 2 468 executions last year, but has suggested the true figure could be much higher. – Sapa-AFP