On Friday afternoon - nearly one year after he was captured following an international manhunt - 44-year-oldwas paraded before the cameras alongside three accomplices also convicted of the 2011 Mekong river massacre in Thailand .

At 2.19pm local time the stony-faced men were bundled into vans by black-clad security forces in the southwestern city of Kunming. By 2.55pm, they were dead, killed by lethal injection.

“Execution implemented,” read an online post from Yunnan province’s Public Security Bureau.

The lead-up to the executions received rolling coverage on China’s state-run CCTV news channel with live analysis from a top Beijing law professor and China’s anti-drug tsar, Liu Yuejin.

“We can see that Naw Kham fears death,” Renmin University criminologist Han Yusheng, told the channel.