Two convicted kidnappers were put to death by lethal injection in an execution shown live on Guatemalan television.

Viewers making breakfast watched on Thursday as Amilcar Cetino Perez, 35, said his last words, which appeared to be a prayer.

Cetino and Tomas Cerrate Hernandez, 39, were sentenced to death for their part in the kidnapping in January 1997 of Bonifassi de Botran, 80, an heir to the Botran liquor distillery fortune, who was found dead after her family paid the ransom. The two men died proclaiming their innocence.

"It's not the kind of thing you want to watch, but you can't stop yourself," said Nerry Rinales, who saw the execution with three employees while opening his car repair shop in Quatemala City. Every channel focused on the executions.

Cetino was strapped down and at 6.05am drugs flowed into his arm from a wall-mounted bag. Over 11 minutes, as he died, the programme showed the line of a heart monitor start to flatten, then it cut back to Cetino's hand as it quivered, then lay still.

"You start to feel sorry for a guy like that when he's lying there and he's dying," said Ana Pinada, who watched both executions as she made breakfast. "But then you think about what he did and you think, 'I'm glad this is happening to him."

The executions, which were rebroadcast continually for hours, caused such a stir here that the Guatemala City newspaper Nuestro Diario said it will publish 220,000 copies - a Guatemalan record.

But the grim show was not for everyone."I turned off the television when I saw what was going on," said Sara de Leon, 49, who did not want her children to watch. "What kind of message can a child learn from that?"

The executions took place after weeks of often wild speculation about possible jailbreaks allegedly planned by the kidnap gang to rescue their condemned associates.

"Everything here has been extremely quiet," said Luis Rivas, a spokesman for the Guatemala City fire department, outside the Pavon rehabilitation work farm, 20 miles south-east of Guatemala City, where the executions took place. "There was no reason for us all to be so nervous."

The gang is also believed to have issued death threats against the family of President Alfonso Portillo, prompting Mr Portillo to send his mother, sister, brother-in-law and two nephews to Canada. Members of the dead woman's family also left Guatemala for the United States this week.

The second execution began at 7.15am. Cerrate was shown being led, shaking, to the death chamber and prison doctors said he had had "a complete nervous breakdown".

The men were the second and third Guatemalans to be executed by lethal injection. The 52 other Guatemalan executions in the last 100 years were by firing squad, the last of which was televised live in September 1996.