''Beltway sniper', dead: Executed tonight

John Allen Muhammad, the urban sniper who terrorized an entire region around the nation's capital with random shootings in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C., that left 10 dead seven years ago, died by lethal injection in Virginia tonight.

Virginia's governor, who personally opposes capital punishment on religious grounds, refused to block the execution today. And the Supreme Court this week declined to intervene in an appeal that had challenged the time which Muhammad, whom his attorneys claimed was mentally ill, had to appeal his death sentence.

Muhammad and a teenage accomplice had gone on a three-week spree of long-range shootings in open public places in 2002 that left people in a wide suburban swath fearful of even stopping at gas stations to refuel their cars or load groceries at stores.

His accomplice, Lee Bond Malvo, is serving life in prison without parole because he was 17 at the time of the killings.

Muhammad, 48, was pronounced dead tonight at 9:11 p.m. EST at Greensville Correctional Center, according to a prison spokesman, after the convict's execution by lethal injection - a sentence carried out in only one of several killings for which he had been convicted.

Outgoing Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, chairman of the Democratic National Committee and a Roman Catholic who has stated his opposition to capital punishment, had promised that he could carry the death penalty if required as governor.

"Crimes that are this horrible, you just can't understand them, you can't explain them," Kaine said. "They completely dwarf your ability to look into the life of a person who would do something like this and understand why."

We have witnessed executions in our time, in Florida and in Texas, both by electrocution and by lethal injection. One is no easier to watch, no more "humane,'' than the other. And the crimes, it seems, have grown more heinous through the years, nothing humane about them either. Muhammad had an option in Virginia: The chair or intraveinous needle and a lethal cocktail. He refused to choose. He got death by default.

Muhammad was sentenced to death for killing Dean Harold Meyers at a gas station in northern Virginia. He and Malvo also were suspected of fatal shootings in Alabama, Arizona, Louisiana and Washington state.

Prosecutors chose to put Muhammad and Malvo on trial in Virginia first because of the state's willingness to execute killers. He and Malvo, also convicted of six other murders in Maryland, both were sentenced to life terms in prison. The death penalty was later ruled out for Malvo, because the Supreme Court barred the execution of juveniles.

Malvo has claimed that Muhammad wanted to use the murders to extort $10 million from the government to set up a camp in Canada where homeless children could be trained as terrorists. But Muhammad's ex-wife has claimed that the attacks were a smoke screen for his plan to kill her and regain custody of their three children. Muhammad has never testified or explained why he directed attacks that terrorized the Washington region.

The shooting spree ending on Oct. 24, 2002, when police captured the two sleeping at a Maryland rest stop in a car rigged for a shooter to hide in the trunk and fire through a hole.

Muhammad had been in and out of the military since graduation from high school in Louisiana. A convert to Islam, John Allen Williams changed his name to Muhammad. He had earned an expert rating on the M-16 rifle -- the military cousin of the .223-caliber Bushmaster rifle used in the sniper shootings.

Wire services contributed to this report, as did the witnessing of four executions in Florida and Texas, three by electric chair, one by lethal injection..