Two former policemen convicted of the rape and killing...

Two former policemen convicted of the rape and killing of a teenager were executed by hanging in a north Bangladesh jail.
Senior prison official Mohammad Azizul Haque said it was the first time that policemen in Bangladesh went to the gallows for such a serious crime.
"The two, Moinul Hoq and Abdus Sattar, were hanged one minute past midnight," he said at the Rangpur jail, 350 km (219 miles) north of Dhaka, where the sentence was carried out. The incident in the northern town of Dinajpur in 1995 sparked angry protests across the country by women and human rights groups, driving the authorities to arrest the offenders and put them on trial.
Accompanied by another policeman, the men kidnapped Yasmin, an 18-year-old housemaid who worked in the capital, late one night when she asked for a lift home in their police van after missing the last bus.
They took her to a lonely spot, where they raped and strangled her, leaving her body beside a road to be found the next morning and returned to her mother, police and town officials said. A third policeman convicted in the incident, Amrita Lal, also faced the death penalty in Rangpur after President Iajuddin Ahmed rejected a mercy appeal from the policemen's family.
A Rangpur judge, Abdul Matin, sentenced the three men to death by hanging on August 31, 1997. But their executions were delayed because they appealed to the High Court against the verdict, and petitioned the president for mercy, officials said.