Jordan executed 15 people on Saturday, including 10 people convicted on terrorism charges, in the largest mass execution in the country's recent history, Reuters reports. Government spokesman Mohammad al Momani was quoted as having told state media those executed included one man who was convicted of an attack last year on an intelligence compound near a Palestinian “refugee camp” in which five security personnel were killed. Another five were involved in an assault by security forces on a militant hideout by suspected Islamic State jihadists in Irbid city in the same year that led to the death of seven militants and one police officer. The rest related to separate incidents that go back as far as 2003. It was the largest number of executions in one day in Jordan's recent history, a senior judicial source who requested anonymity said, according to Reuters . At least one hundred detainees have been sentenced to death in recent years, many on charges related to membership in Islamist groups, who could face capital punishment. Jordan has been targeted by several terrorist attacks in recent years, particularly since it became a leading member of the U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria. In 2015, ISIS shot down a Jordanian warplane conducting airstrikes on Syria as part of the international coalition. The warplane’s pilot, Maaz al-Kassasbeh, was captured and subsequently burned alive . Jordan responded by executing two jihadist prisoners it had held, and later launched retaliatory airstrikes against dozens of ISIS targets. Amnesty International condemned Saturday’s executions by hanging, saying they had been carried out in "secrecy and without transparency." "The scale of today's mass executions is shocking and it's a big step backwards on human rights protection in Jordan," Samah Hadid, deputy director of Amnesty International's Beirut regional office, told Reuters . Hadid said the death penalty was "problematic because in some cases confessions in Jordan were extracted under torture or duress". Jordan restored the death sentence by hanging in 2014 after a moratorium on capital punishment between 2006 and 2014.
