Beijing:
China on Tuesday defended its decision to brush aside international appeals and execute a British drug smuggler who relatives say was mentally unstable and unwittingly lured into crime.
On Tuesday, following the execution of Akmal Shaikh, Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown criticised the move and said he was "disappointed" that his country's "persistent requests for clemency have not been granted."
However, during a regular news briefing on Tuesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Jiang Yu defended the execution.
Drug dealing is a serious crime which is widely acknowledged around the world. It seriously hurts civil society and all governments severely crackdown on this crime. During the trial of this case all Akmal's rights were protected," she said.
She said China hoped the execution should not affect the "bilateral relations" of the two countries.
Jiang also criticised Brown's comments, and said Britain's reaction was "unreasonable."
"We express our dissatisfaction and firm opposition to the unreasonable accusation of British government. We urge the Britain to correct their mistake to avoid damaging the bilateral relations," Jiang said.
Jiang also called on London not to create any "obstacles" to better ties.
Shaikh, 53, first learned he was about to be executed on Monday from his visiting cousins, who made a last-minute plea for his life.
They say he is mentally unstable and was lured to China from a life on the street in Poland by men playing on his dreams to record a pop song for world peace.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown had previously spoken personally to China's prime minister about his case.
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband also condemned the execution and said there were unanswered questions about the trial.
Shaikh was arrested in 2007 for carrying a suitcase with almost 9 pounds (4 kilograms) of heroin into China on a flight from Tajikistan.
He told Chinese officials he didn't know about the drugs and that the suitcase wasn't his, according to Reprieve, a London-based prisoner advocacy group that is helping with his case.
He was convicted in 2008 after a half-hour trial.
The official Xinhua News Agency quoted China's Supreme Court as saying on Tuesday that although officials from the British Embassy and a British aid organisation called for a mental health examination for Shaikh, "the documents they provided could not prove he had a mental disorder nor did members of his family have a history of mental disease."
"There is no reason to cast doubt on Akmal Shaikh's mental status," the Supreme Court was quoted as saying.
China's Xinhua news agency said Shaikh was put to death by lethal injection.
China, which executes more people than any other country, is increasingly doing so by lethal injection, although some death sentences are still carried out by a shot in the head.
The Beijing-based lawyer for Shaikh's death sentence review, Zhang Qingsong, said on Tuesday he never got to meet with Shaikh despite asking the judge and the detention centre for access.
He said China's highest court never evaluated Shaikh's mental status.
According to Reprieve, the last European executed in China was Antonio Riva, an Italian pilot who was shot by a firing squad in 1951 after being convicted of involvement in what China said was a plot to assassinate Mao Zedong and other high-ranking communist officials.