Death row inmate’s dreadful dilemma: lethal drugs or cyanide used by Nazis

Lawyers for Frank Atwood urge him not to choose as method of execution poison gas used to murder millions during Holocaust

A death row inmate in Arizona has two weeks to decide whether to be executed with cyanide gas, the poison known as Zyklon B used by the Nazis to murder millions of people in Auschwitz and other extermination camps.

On Tuesday the supreme court of Arizona issued an execution warrant for Frank Atwood that, barring last-minute appeals, will see him put to death on 8 June. The prisoner now has until 19 May to choose his preferred method of death - either lethal injection or hydrogen cyanide, a poisonous gas made notorious by the Nazis as a mass killing technique during the Holocaust.