China on Tuesday executed a Japanese citizen convicted of drug trafficking despite pleas for clemency, state media said.
"Japanese citizen Mitsunobu Akano was executed Tuesday morning in the north-eastern Liaoning province for smuggling drugs from China," the Supreme People's Court said in a brief statement carried by the official Xinhua news agency.
Relatives of Akano, 65, were believed to have met him on Monday at a detention centre in Liaoning's Dalian city, Japan's Kyodo News reported.
On Saturday, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao defended the death sentences against Akano and three other Japanese citizens convicted of drug smuggling, Kyodo said earlier.
At a meeting with Japanese Finance Minister Naoto Kan, Wen said the four convicted drug traffickers had committed a "serious crime" and that the sentences were "based on Chinese law," the agency said.
Akano was arrested in 2004 at an airport in Dalian as he was attempting to smuggle 2.5 kilograms of unidentified drugs to Japan, earlier reports said.
His execution is the first of a Japanese citizen in China since the two nations normalized diplomatic relations in 1972.
Despite pleas for clemency from the British government and international rights groups, China executed British man Akmal Shaikh for drug trafficking in December, the first execution of a European national in China in 50 years.
China has reported several other executions of foreigners convicted of drug trafficking. Most of them were citizens of neighbouring Asian countries such as Myanmar and Taiwan.
In September, Japan's Asahi Shimbun newspaper said Akano had been wanted by Japanese police since he fled the country in 2002.
He was "believed to be the ringleader of a group of Japanese and Chinese accused of pulling off a string of robberies in Aichi and Fukuoka prefectures between 2002 and 2003," the newspaper said.
Akano was sentenced to death in June 2008 and his sentence was confirmed last year by a higher court, Chinese media said.
London-based Amnesty International last week appealed to China to make public its annual number of death sentences and executions, which remain a state secret.
Amnesty said China again executed more people than the rest of the world put together in 2009, adding that "evidence from previous years and a number of current sources indicates that the figure remains in the thousands."
On Thursday, five Chinese citizens convicted of drug trafficking were executed in the south-eastern province of Fujian, Xinhua said.