AMMAN: Human rights groups took Jordan to task on Sunday as the country ended an eight-year moratorium on the death penalty with the hangings of 11 men convicted of murder.

The men were executed at dawn in a prison about 70 km from the capital Amman, interior ministry spokesman Ziyad Zoobi was quoted as saying by the official Petra news agency.

Authorities said the men were all Jordanians convicted on murder charges, with no links to politics or extremism, in 2005 and 2006.

A source in the prison system said the men were mostly in their 40s. “Some of the prisoners asked to have their final words passed on their families, others asked only to smoke a cigarette,” the source said.

Jordan’s last previous executions were in June 2006 and 122 people have since been sentenced to death.

Interior Minister Hussein Majali suggested recently that the moratorium might end, saying there was a “major debate” in Jordan on the death penalty and that “the public believes that the rise in crime has been the result of the non-application” of capital punishment.

Experts said the government was responding to a rise in Jordan’s crime rate.