ALBAWABA - Iraqi authorities announced the hanging of three of the convicts in the killing of 300 Iraqis when a vehicle filled with explosives was blown up next to a crowded shopping center in Karrada, a mainly Shia Muslim area of the Iraqi capital Baghdad.
The attack happened on July 3, 2016, when the bomb exploded as people were enjoying a night out during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. The Islamic State (ISIS) later claimed the attack.
Prime Minister Mohammed Shiaa office announced in a statement that the executions were carried out on Sunday or Monday, without naming any of them.
A government source told AFP news agency that Ghazwan al-Zawbaee, held to be the IS mastermind behind the Karrada attack, was among those put to death. Zawbaee had been captured and returned to Iraq in 2021, BBC reported.
The prime minister's office delivered the news to victims' families and told them that "the rightful punishment of death sentence" had been carried out against "three key criminals found guilty of their involvement in the terrorist bombing", al-Sudani's office said in the statement.
The then-Prime Minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, accused Zawbaee of being the "primary culprit" behind that attack and "many others".
ISIS previously controlled 88,000 square kilometers of territory ranging from eastern Iraq to western Syria and ruled over about eight million people. Despite the group's defeat on the battlefield in Iraq in 2017 and in Syria two years later, thousands of fighters are thought to be still operating in both countries.
In March, the UN estimated that IS still had "5,000 to 7,000 members and supporters" across Iraq and neighboring Syria, "roughly half of whom are fighters".
