In many legal jurisdictions a murder involving "exceptional brutality or cruelty" will involve a harsher sentence.

Therefore, the war against drug traffickers comes on top of a war between rival criminal gangs, resulting in a series of murders of exceptional brutality.

For more than half of this century, the former Prussian and German Imperial capital was the command post of totalitarian regimes of exceptional brutality.

German and German-allied forces treated civilian populations with exceptional brutality, massacring whole village populations and routinely killing civilian hostages.

According to Brass the only conclusion from the evidence which is available points to a methodical pogrom which was carried out with exceptional brutality and was highly coordinated.

Information about the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo is especially alarming as the acts of exceptional brutality being committed are taking place in the vicinity of the UN peacekeeping camp.

The Polish Parliament stood for a minute's silence after approving unanimously a resolution which accused the Romanian authorities of 'exceptional brutality' leading to children being shot at and expressed solidarity with the 'victims of terror.'

In some parts of the world, such as South America, existing democracies with traditions of constitutionalism such as Chile and Uruguay have been destroyed and replaced with military-authoritarian regimes of exceptional brutality.

Even after the end of the war, German irregular troops, the so-called Free Corps, continued to operate in the Baltic states in a guerrilla war against the Bolsheviks, fought with exceptional brutality on both sides.

But it is also true that Congo was different in some ways, different because of the unusual cruelty of Belgian colonialism (grippingly recounted in Adam Hochschild's recent book "King Leopold's Ghost") and because of the exceptional brutality and corruption of the Mobutu regime after Lumumba's fall.