WORLD : 70 Drug Smugglers Hanged in Iran

Seventy drug smugglers were hanged in Tehran and 25 other Iranian cities today, an official report said, the largest number of traffickers executed in a single day of a ferocious anti-narcotics crackdown.

Sixty-seven men were hanged in public at dawn in a blinding snowstorm and three women were executed inside Iranian prisons, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported. Seven of the men were hanged in Tehran’s Shusha and Korasan squares in a public spectacle that underlined the government’s determination to eliminate drug smuggling and abuse, which officials say has become a major problem.