As executions rise in Egypt, veteran hangman says he entered Guinness World Records 

As human rights groups continue to raise the alarm about the use of the death penalty in Egypt, veteran executioner, Hussein Ashmawy, said he has entered the Guinness World Records for carrying out the highest number of executions in the world.

“The title of Ashmawy was applied to the executioners since 1922 until it became an adjective for that profession,” Ashmawy told local satellite station DMC in a TV interview, adding that people were “always terrified of my profession.”

The interview with the Egyptian hangman comes one month after Human Rights Watch criticised Egyptian authorities for carrying out 49 executions in ten days, between the 3-13 October. The rights watchdog’s Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa, Joe Stark, said at the time: “Egypt’s mass executions of scores of people in a matter of days is outrageous. The systematic absence of fair trials in Egypt, especially in political cases, makes every death sentence a violation of the right to life.”

During the interview, Ashmawy said he had carried out a total of “1,070 executions”, noting that he had carried out the “largest number of executions globally since the 1990s until my retirement in 2011.”

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“I’ve executed numerous public figures, one of whom was the female spy, Heba Salem, who was the main cause of the Bahr Al-Baqar primary school massacre,” he noted. The massacre took place in the Egyptian village of Bahr Al-Baqar, where the Israeli air force targeted a primary school on 8 April 1970, leaving 46 children dead and 50 others wounded. The school was completely demolished.

He stressed that because of his line of work, he had to have “no emotions”.

Ashmawy was born in 1947 in Egypt’s fifth largest province of Tanta and served in the Egyptian military until 1967.