Jordan's state security court upheld death sentences against Abu Hoshar and Osama Sammar, two Islamist militants convicted of plotting attacks against Jewish and Western tourists during millennium celebrations.

the Kenyan government planned to commute death sentences to life in prison, Kiraitu Murungi, the country's justice and constitutional affairs minister, announced.

Kuwait’s public prosecutor demanded the death penalty for 34 of 37 militants suspected of links to Al Qaeda and deadly clashes with police in January 2005.

nine Libyan policemen and a physician were cleared of torturing five Bulgarian nurses to force them to confess to deliberately infecting hundreds of Libyan children with HIV.

Trajan Markovski, the lawyer of five Bulgarian nurses facing the death penalty in Libya for allegedly giving children AIDS-tainted blood, vowed to have their sentences overturned even though Libyan leader Moamer Gaddafi called them "murderers". "Despite all recent goings on, I insist that the sentences will be repealed," Markovski, said.

it was reported that Malaysia’s hangmen and floggers had won pay rises. For every hanging, executioners would be paid the equivalent of 100 EU (490 Malaysian Ringgits), up from 60 EU.

the Federal Court of Malaysia in Bernama upheld the conviction and death sentence imposed on Francis Antonysamy for murdering a Bangladeshi man in oil palm estate in Temerloh. Francis, 33, had been sentenced to death by the Temerloh High Court for murdering Ali Ahmmed Mohammed Ullah at the Kim Swee Leong oil palm plantation near Kuala Lumpur on August 19, 1994.

a court in Mali condemned five people to death and dozens to prison for their part in a religious clash that killed 10 people.

the Mexican Senate voted overwhelmingly to explicitly forbid the death penalty, which had not been imposed in the country since 1961.

the Abakaliki high court, Nigeria, sentenced 15 people to death by hanging for killing three over a land dispute.

the family of Scottish businessman Ian Millar, sentenced to death in Nigeria, spoke of their relief after his murder conviction was overturned. Millar, 56, spent a year and a half on death row after being found guilty of killing Anne Marie Gale, his girlfriend, at their home in Lagos in April 2003.

North Korea put two human traffickers to death in public in late February for smuggling North Korean women into China. The public execution took place in the North Korean city of Hoeryong, close to the border with China.