AMMAN (Reuters) - Jordan executed by hanging on Wednesday a jailed Iraqi woman militant hours after Islamic State fighters released a video appearing to show a captured Jordanian pilot being burnt alive in a cage, a security source and state television said.
The militants had demanded the release of the woman, Sajida al-Rishawi, in exchange for a Japanese hostage who was later killed.
Responding to the killing of pilot Muath al-Kasaesbeh, the Jordanian authorities also executed another senior al Qaeda prisoner sentenced to death for plots to wage attacks against the pro-Western kingdom in the last decade.
Al-Rishawi was sentenced to death for her role in a 2005 suicide bomb attack that killed 60 people. It was the worst Islamist suicide attack in Jordan's history.
Ziyad Karboli, an Iraqi al Qaeda operative, who was convicted in 2008 for killing a Jordanian, was also executed at dawn, said the security source, who declined to be identified.
Islamic State had demanded her release in exchange for the life of Japanese hostage Kenji Goto. However, Goto, a veteran war reporter, was later beheaded by the group, with images of his death released in a video last Saturday.
But the kingdom had insisted that they would only release the woman, whose tribal Iraqi relatives were close aides of the slain Jordanian leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq Abu Musab al-Zarqawi whom Islamic State hold in high esteem as their mentor, as part of a deal to release the pilot.