HUNDREDS PUT TO DEATH IN CHINA FOR DRUG OFFENSES

BEIJING - China marked a U.N. anti-drug day yesterday by executing
dozens of people for drug crimes, burning narcotics and staging
rallies nationwide.

Chinese authorities have executed hundreds of people since April in a
crime crackdown labeled "Strike Hard" that allows for speeded up
trials and broader use of the death penalty. On Monday and Tuesday
alone, authorities executed at least 60 people for drug offences.

Thousands of people attended a rally at a stadium in Kunming, capital
of southwestern Yunnan province, where 20 suspected drug traffickers
were sentenced to death, then executed at a separate location, a
police official said.

Officials in Kunming used remote-control detonators to ignite 2 tons
of confiscated heroin placed in large metal pans and doused with
gasoline. State television broadcast the burning live.

Separately yesterday, eight people in the central city of Wuhan and
eight people on the southern island of Hainan were executed for drug
trafficking. In coastal Fujian province, five Taiwanese citizens were
executed Monday for attempting to smuggle crystal methamphetamine to
Taiwan.

Yunnan authorities also executed Li Shaoju, a citizen of Myanmar, on
Monday for smuggling more than 300 pounds of heroin, opium, and
morphine from Myanmar, also known as Burma, to China, newspapers
reported.

"Drug abuse, drug trafficking are indeed very terrible problems of
our day," U.N. deputy spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva said in New
York. But he added that as far as he was aware, a 1998 U.N.
convention that sets a legal framework for fighting drug trafficking
"does not provide for the application of the death penalty."

China has detained 15,000 suspected drug dealers and seized 2.2 tons
of heroin, 1.2 tons of opium, and 2 tons of methamphetamine in the
first five months of the year, state media reported.

The number of registered drug addicts in China has risen to 860,000
in 2000 from 681,000 in 1999, according to the Ministry of Public
Security.