A CONVICTED cop killer was executed by a firing squad in South Carolina as officials ramp up their return to the death penalty.
Mikal Mahdi, 42, was shot dead inside Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia at 6.05pm on Friday – marking the state's second rare execution in just over a month.
He was sentenced to death for the 2004 murder of off-duty public safety officer Captain James Myers, who was shot nine times and set on fire in a shed where he had married his wife just 15 months earlier.
Mahdi had also killed a North Carolina convenience store clerk three days before gunning down Myers.
The killer chose the rare method over the electric chair or lethal injection, fearing being “burned and mutilated”; or “suffering a lingering death”;, his attorney said.
Strapped to a metal chair beneath a hood and with a red bullseye target placed over his heart, Mahdi offered no final words and refused to look at the nine witnesses behind the bulletproof glass.
He cried out and flexed his arms as three prison staff fired rounds into his chest, then groaned twice more before taking a final breath 80 seconds later.
A doctor pronounced him dead four minutes after the shots were fired.
Mahdi's execution was the fifth in the state in less than eight months, and the 12th in the US so far this year.
It followed last month’s – South Carolina’s first firing squad death since resuming executions after a 13-year pause.
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