Pakistan
Pakistan hanged four militants on December 21, 2014, after abruptly lifting a standing moratorium on the death penalty in response to a Taliban massacre of Peshawar schoolchildren executed five days prior.
(The first post-moratorium hangings actually took place on Friday, December 19: Aqeel Ahmad and Arshad Mehmood, both hanged at Faisalabad Jail.)
“We have started these executions by hanging two terrorists,” Anti-Terrorism Minister Shuja Khanzada said. “Today’s executions of terrorists will boost the morale of the nation, and we are planning to hang more terrorists next week.”
The hanged men on this date had no direct connection to the Peshawar attack; they had instead been condemned for plotting the assassination of former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf.
They were identified as Rasheed Qureshi, Zubair Ahmad, Ghulam Sarwar and Akhlas Akhlaq Ahmed. The last of these men was a Russian national, who protested in vain that he had not even been in Pakistan during the terror plot.
Jordan
Jordan also ended an eight-year moratorium on executions on December 21, 2014 and did so in volume — hanging no fewer than 11 people at dawn for murders dating back to 2005 and 2006.
On this day..
- 1739: Elizabeth Harrard - 2019
- 1929: Peter Kudzinowski - 2018
- 1782: Patrick Dougherty, robber - 2017
- 1689: William Davis - 2015
- 1875: Henry Wainwright, Whitechapel murderer - 2014
- 1893: Frederick Wyndham, unrepentant patricide - 2013
- 1692: A batch at Tyburn, escorted by the Ordinary of Newgate - 2012
- 1838: The first hangings of the Lower Canada Rebellion - 2011
- 1936: Aberra Kassa and Asfawossen Kassa, Ethiopian royalty - 2010
- 1624: Marco Antonio de Dominis, posthumously - 2009
- 1855: The slave Celia, who had no right to resist - 2008
- 1995: Kimura Shujish - 2007