Madam, - Some journalists show a disturbing fondness for the term "execution" to describe the most informal and clearly illegal killings.
I don't mean to be pedantic - and it's a point that has been raised before - but I am surprised to find still in your pages confusion over how some people in Iraq are meeting their deaths.
Most dictionaries I can find define "execution" as "the putting to death in accordance with law or as a legal penalty". The word certainly has connotations of legitimacy and formality and cannot be extended to the killing of people who are clearly held in unlawful detention.
On your front page of November 17th you describe the shooting of Mrs Margaret Hassan as a murder, yet inside one of your correspondents mulls over the "execution" of an injured and unarmed man by a soldier. Neither killing could in any circumstances be described as an "execution".
Assuming the man on the ground in the mosque was reaching for his gun, he would have been killed in combat, but not "executed". Your newspaper is not the only medium with this problem - even Kenneth Bigley, according to some news sources, was "executed".
Shooting a kidnapped woman in the head is a murder, or at least a killing. So is hacking off a kidnapped man's head with a knife and shooting an injured and unarmed man in the head.
Perhaps you could stick to the neutral term "killed" and let readers decide for themselves whether a particular case was a murder, an execution or a slaughter. - Yours, etc.,
DARA McCLUSKEY, Belgium Park, Monaghan.