WASHINGTON: Rights groups and leading democrats have lashed out at the US federal government’s move to resume executions after a hiatus of 16-years.

Several candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination demanded that death penalty be abolished.

On Thursday Attorney General William Barr said five inmates would be executed. They had been convicted of murders or rapes of children or the elderly, he said. The executions have been scheduled for December 2019 and January 2020.

“Under administrations of both parties, the Department of Justice has sought the death penalty against the worst criminals,” Mr Barr said in a statement. “The Justice Department upholds the rule of law – and we owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.”

Barr’s announcement lifts what was an informal moratorium on the federal death penalty – as opposed to state-directed executions – since the 2003 execution of Louis Jones Jr, a 53-year-old a Gulf War veteran who murdered 19-year-old soldier Tracie Joy McBride.