Iraq executes seven Arab members of al-Qaeda

Iraq on Wednesday executed seven men of various Arab nationalities who were convicted of belonging to al-Qaeda network, officials said.

The seven were detained more than four years ago and found guilty of terrorist activities with the al-Qaeda's franchise in Iraq that later formed the backbone of the Islamic State group.

"The death penalty has been carried out against seven terrorists holding various Arab nationalities after the completion of their legal procedures," said a statement by the Iraqi ministry of justice.

"The blood of the martyrs will not go unpunished," Haidar al-Zamili, the minister of justice, said in the statement.

Dakhel Radhi, a member of the provincial council of Dhiqar said the convicts were from "Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Sudan, Palestine, Syria and Jordan," all of who were hanged in Nasiriyah prison, in southern Iraq on Wednesday morning.

An official in the Nasiriyah prison administration speaking on condition of anonymity said the seven had all been jailed for more than four years but could not provide further details.

He said around 60 other convicts from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Libya and Algeria were still being held in Nasiriyah prison on similar charges.

He did not say how many of them had been sentenced to death.

On August 21, Iraq hanged 36 men convicted over the 2014 massacre of up to Shia 1,700 military recruits.

The massacre was the first carried out by IS allied militants after the group swept across large swathes of Iraqi territory and seized Mosul, the country’s second city.

Rights group Amnesty International said at the time that the hangings brought to at least 81 the number of executions carried out by the Iraqi state this year.

Amnesty and other rights organisations had also criticised the hangings as resulting from botched trials.