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Communist Vietnam's secret death penalty conveyor belt: How country trails only China and Iran for 'astonishing' number of executions

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Prisoners are dragged from their cells at 4am without warning to be given a lethal injection Vietnam's use of the death penalty has been thrust into the spotlight after a real estate tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to be executed in one of the biggest corruption cases in the country's history. Truong My Lan, a businesswoman who chaired a sprawling company that developed luxury apartments, hotels, offices and shopping malls, was arrested in 2022.

View to a kill: Indian hangman prepares for his first execution

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Pawan Kumar
Pawan Kumar, who learned his trade from his father and grandfather, is paid £30 a month as a registered executioner

The phone call will come some time in the next few weeks, and when it does Pawan Kumar will be ready.

"I have already done a test run, with a sack of sand the weight of the criminal. I have been waiting for this moment all my life," said the part-time clothes hawker in the northern Indian town of Meerut.

For while selling shirts from the back of a bicycle pays Kumar's rent, his vocation lies elsewhere: the 52-year-old is one of a handful of officially registered professional hangmen in India.

So far, however, he has never actually carried out an execution.

Last month, he was called to a jail in the city of Jaipur, 250 miles south of Meerut, to execute a condemned prisoner. At the last minute though, the man was reprieved.

In early September, Kumar was scheduled to hang Surinder Koli, one of India's most notorious murderers. But another last-minute decision meant the execution was postponed to allow further legal argument, though just until the end of next month.

"I wouldn't say I was disappointed. That would be a personal thing. I am just sorry that a man who has committed such heinous acts has not died yet," said Kumar.

In India, the death sentence is reserved for cases that are deemed "the rarest of the rare". In the past decade, there have been only three executions. The 350 convicted prisoners who theoretically face hanging include four men found guilty of the gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old student in Delhi in 2012.


Source: The Guardian, September 18, 2014
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