Japan hanged three inmates yesterday in its first executions this year amid a growing push to fight crime in one of the world's safest countries.
The justice ministry confirmed the executions but declined to disclose details including the names of those hanged, a standard procedure in Japan.
News reports said the executed men were all convicted murderers.
Japan is the only major industrialized nation other than the US to practice the death penalty.
Japan last carried out executions in December, hanging four inmates on Christmas Day.
Those were the first executions to be carried out after a 15-month gap that resulted from a previous justice minister's opposition to the death penalty.
Human rights group Amnesty International, which opposes all forms of capital punishment, said that Japanese Justice Minister Jinen Nagase was stepping up the pace of executions.
"Globally speaking, the use of capital punishment is declining," said Makoto Teranaka, a spokesman for Amnesty International Japan.
"Public safety in Japan is also improving. Despite that, Japan is tending to hand out harsher punishment," he said.
"It's very worrying from the human rights' point of view," he said.
The Kyodo News agency, citing unnamed sources, named the executed inmates as Yoshikatsu Oda, Masahiro Tanaka and Kosaku Nada.
They were hanged separately in prisons in Tokyo, Osaka and Fukuoka, it said.
Oda was sentenced to death in March 2000 for murdering two people for insurance money in 1990 in Fukuoka Prefecture, Kyodo said.
Tanaka was convicted of the murders of four people from 1984 to 1991 in different provinces, while Nada was convicted of killing two people in a 1983 robbery in western Hyogo Prefecture, Kyodo said.
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