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Washington sniper put to death
11.11.09
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A sniper who terrorised America during a three-week killing spree in 2002 has been executed by lethal injection.
John Allen Muhammad, 48, and his teenage accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo were behind a series of attacks that left 10 people dead in and around the Washington DC area.
Muhammad was pronounced dead at 9.11pm local time (2.11am Wednesday, GMT) at the Greenville Correctional Centre in Virginia.
He took five minutes to succumb to the drugs after being injected at 9.06pm.
The sniper was asked if he wished to give a final statement, but remained silent.
Witnesses said he staggered into the execution room flanked by prison officers. He twitched a minute into the procedure but was largely motionless, they added.
In a statement, Muhammad's attorney Jonathan Sheldon said his client's family deeply sympathise with the families and loved ones who had to relive the pain of the events of seven years ago. He added: "Our sympathies also extend to the children of John Muhammad who with humility and self-consciousness today lost a father and a member of their family."
Bob Meyers, whose brother Dean's murder led to the execution, witnessed the moment the killer died and said it represented a "point of closure".
He told CNN's Larry King Live: "It was surreal watching the life sapped out of someone intentionally... But that was pretty much overcome just by the sadness that the whole situation generates in my heart."
The execution followed the failure of an 11th-hour appeal by his lawyers to commute the sentence to life imprisonment on the ground that the convicted murderer was severely mentally ill.
