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Over the last three years, Vietnam has executed 429 people, making them the biggest practitioner of capital punishment in Southeast Asia according to a report by Amnesty International. It places them third place for most state executions, just behind Iran and China.Vietnam's execution numbers have been a state secret for years, until the Ministry of Public Security recently released data showing those killed by the state between August 6, 2013 and June 30, 2016. No other data was released on who was killed and for what crimes.Recent death penalty reforms, which dropped firing squads in 2011 and abolished the death penalty for seven crimes in 2015, lead many observers to believe that Vietnam was moving away from executions."The magnitude of executions in Vietnam in recent years is truly shocking," said Salil Shetty, secretary-general of Amnesty International. "This conveyor belt of executions completely overshadows recent death penalty reforms."The data released by Vietnam did not offer a year-on-year breakdown, but they executed on average, 147 prisoners a year. This trend in Vietnam is out of line with the rest of the region, where only nine people, on average, were executed Malaysia and an average of four in Singapore and Indonesia.