DEATH MOBILE

By Antoaneta Bezlova BEIJING - Responding to criticism that China cruelly and arbitrarily executes a large number of its citizens each year, officials are gradually moving toward what they say is a more discreet way of killing its prisoners: execution vans. Human-rights critics say they may look more like officially sanctioned roaming death squads, which simply allow China to execute its prisoners quickly, easily and out of the public eye. Chinese legal officials counter that the fleet of execution vehicles is a "more humane" form of carrying out death sentences. One thing for sure: they are a radical departure from publicly held execution rallies organized in the past.