Ten of those put to death had
been convicted of terrorism offences and five of “heinous” crimes including
rape, Mahmud al-Momani told the official Petra news agency.
Jordan hanged 15 death row prisoners at dawn on Saturday, its
information minister said, in a further break with the moratorium on executions
it had observed between 2006 and 2014.
Ten of those put to death had been convicted of terrorism offences
and five of “heinous” crimes including rape, Mahmud al-Momani told the official
Petra news agency. All were Jordanians and they were hanged in Suaga prison
south of the capital Amman.
Among the terrorism offences were a 2006 attack on tourists at
Amman’s Roman amphitheatre which killed a Briton and a June 2016 attack on an
intelligence service base north of the capital that left five agents dead.
They also included the September 2016 murder of Christian writer
Nahed Hattar as he stood trial for publishing a cartoon deemed offensive to
Islam.
King Abdullah II had said in 2005 that Jordan aimed to become the
first Middle Eastern country to halt executions in line with most European
nations.
Courts continued to hand down death sentences but they were not
carried out.
However, public opinion blamed a rise in crime on the policy and
in December 2014 Jordan hanged 11 men convicted of murder, drawing criticism
from human rights groups.
Opinion hardened after the murder by the Islamic State group of
captured Jordanian pilot Maaz al-Kassasbeh whose plane had crashed in a
jihadist-held region of Syria in December 2014 while serving with a US-led
coalition.
Grisly footage posted in February the following year of him being
burnt alive in a cage outraged the public. Swiftly afterwards, Jordan hanged
two people convicted of terrorism offences, one of them Sajida al-Rishawi.
She had taken part in a 2005 suicide attack on luxury hotels in
Amman organised by IS’s forebear, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, but her explosives failed
to detonate. According to judicial sources, 94 people remain on death row in
Jordan, most of them convicted of murder or rape.
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