WASHINGTON: A South Carolina man convicted of murdering his exgirlfriend`s parents with a baseball bat was put to death by firing squad on Friday in the first such execution in the United States in 15 years.

Brad Sigmon, 67, was executed by a three-person firing squad at the BroadRiverCorrectionalInstitution in the state capital Columbia, South Carolina prison spokeswoman Chrysti Shain said.

Shain said the fatal shots were fired at 6:05pm and Sigmon was pronounced dead by a physician at 6:08pm. Journalists who witnessedthe execution from behind bulletproof glass said Sigmon was wearing a black jumpsuit with a small red bullseye made of paper or cloth over his heart and was strapped into a chair in the death chamber.

In a final statement read out by his attorney, Gerald `Bo` King, Sigmon said he wanted to send a message of `love and a calling to my fellow Christians to help us end the death penalty.` A hood was then placed over Sigmon`s head. About two minutes later, the firing squad volunteers from the South Carolina Department of Corrections firedtheir rifles through a slit in a wall about 15 feet (five metres) away.

Anna Dobbins of WYFF News 4 TV station said the shots `were all fired at once` like it was `just one sound.` `His arms flexed,` Dobbins said. `There was something in his midsection that moved I`m not necessarily going to call them breaths, I don`t really know but there was some movement that went on there for two or three seconds.

`It was very fast,` she said. `I did see a splash of blood when the bullets entered his body. It was not a huge amount, but there was a splash.Sigmon, who confessed to the 2001 murders of David and Gladys Larke and admitted his guilt at trial, had asked the Supreme Court for a lastminute stay of execution but it was denied. South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster also rejected his appeal for clemency.

`Impossible` position `Brad`s death was horrifying and violent,` King, his lawyer, said in a statement. `It is unfathomable that, in 2025, South Carolina would execute one of its citizens in this bloody spectacle.` Sigmon had a choicebetween lethal injection, the firing squad or the electric chair.

King said Sigmon had chosen the firing squad after being placed in an `impossible` position, forced to decide how he would die. The electric chair `would burn and cook him alive,` he said, but the alternative was `just as monstrous.` `If he chose lethal injection, he risked the prolonged death suffered by all three of the men South Carolina has executed since September,` King said.

The last firing squad execution in the United States was in Utah in 2010, which also carried out two oth-ers, one in 1996 and one in 1977. The 1977 execution of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore was the basis for the 1979 book `The Executioner`s Song` by Norman Mailer.

The vast majority of US executions have been carried out by lethal injection since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

Alabama has carried out four executions recently using nitrogen gas, which has been denounced by UN experts as cruel and inhumane. The execution is performed by pumping nitrogen gas into a facemask, causing the prisoner to suffocate.-AFP