Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev

Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev pledged to eliminate the death penalty in a decree extending the Central Asian country's moratorium on carrying out executions that had been in place since 1998.
In the decree, Bakiyev gave the government two months to draft a law replacing the death penalty with long terms of imprisonment, including life sentences. Officials said there were about 200 prisoners on death row in the country of about five million people.