March 21, 2003	Friday	Muharram 17, 1424

LONDON, March 20: Amnesty International has expressed its dismay at President George Bush’s support for the execution of former soldier Louis Jones on Tuesday.

In a statement here, the human rights organisation said: “We deeply regret that the president has once again failed to offer human rights leadership on this fundamental issue”. “His repeated assertions that the US would stand firm for the ‘non-negotiable demands of human dignity’ were drained of meaning as Louis Jones was taken from his cell and injected with poison by government employees”.

Louis Jones, a veteran of the 1990/91 Gulf war, was sentenced to death in 1995 for the murder of Tracie Joy Mcbride, a private in the US army.