BAGHDAD, Iraq (AFP) — Iraqi authorities have hanged at least 21 people, including a woman, most of them convicted over “terrorism” charges, three security sources said on Wednesday.

It was reportedly the highest number of executions reported in one day in years in Iraq, which has previously come under fire over its trial processes and the use of capital punishment on a mass scale.

“Twenty-one convicts including a woman were executed” on charges including “terrorism” and being part of the Islamic State jihadist group, an Iraqi security official told AFP.

“The woman was part of a group who killed a person” in 2019 as anti-government protesters demonstrated elsewhere in Baghdad, the source said.

A young man accused of firing shots was killed and his body hanged from a pole.

The same security source said they were executed in Al-Hut prison in the southeastern city of Nassiriya. Two other sources said they were all Iraqi nationals.

A medical source in Dhi Qar province, of which Nassiriya is the capital, said the forensic department had received the bodies of the executed convicts from the prison authority.

It was not immediately possible to confirm when the executions took place, with some sources saying Tuesday and others Wednesday.

Courts have handed down hundreds of death and life sentences in recent years to Iraqis convicted of “terrorism”, in trials rights groups have denounced as hasty.

In July, authorities hanged 10 “terror” convicts in Nassiriya, prompting a rights group to call for an end to the death penalty.

And in May, eight people were executed after being convicted on similar charges, while another 11 people were hanged earlier that month.

In late January, UN experts looking into the issue expressed “deep concern at reports that Iraq has begun mass executions in its prison system”.

The independent experts, who are appointed by the UN Human Rights Council but do not speak on its behalf, mentioned in their statement executions carried out late last year in the Nassiriya prison.

The statement said that “13 male Iraqi prisoners — previously sentenced to death –- were executed on 25 December 2023”, calling it “the largest number of convicted prisoners reportedly executed by the Iraqi authorities in one day” since November 16, 2020, when 20 were executed.

At the end of July, Iraq’s Justice Minister Khaled Shuani dismissed the UN experts’ analysis as “not based on documented evidence”, the official Iraqi News Agency reported.