Eight people have been sentenced to death in Iraq, half of them over a 2020 car bombing in the city of Ramadi, the judiciary said on Thursday.
A criminal court in Anbar, a province in western Iraq, “sentenced four terrorists to death by hanging for setting off a car bomb in Ramadi”, the Supreme Judicial Council said.
The men who carried out the September 2020 attack that wounded six people had been “working with the terrorist gangs” of the Islamic State group, it said in a statement.
IS established a so-called caliphate across Iraq and Syria from 2014 and, although Iraq declared victory over the jihadists three years later, they still pose a threat and carry out attacks.
In a separate case, a criminal court in Najaf, south of Baghdad, handed the death sentence to four men over the killing of a policeman in January 2021.
The Supreme Judicial Council said the officer had “wanted to buy a car” but “when he arrived, they shot him and stole his money”.
Amnesty International said in a report last year that Iraq was the world’s fourth leading executioner.
The London-based advocacy group said it recorded nearly 50 executions in the country in 2020, including of many people found to be IS jihadists.
