In their southward advance, the KPA purged the Republic of Korea's intelligentsia by killing civil servants and intellectuals.

After seizing power in 1975, he ordered his followers, the Khmer Rouge, to kill intellectuals, clear out cities and eradicate religion.

Stalin and Mao killed kulaks, merchants and intellectuals to create a purer proletarian society.

Mueen-Uddin was a journalist at the Daily Purbodesh in 1971 and he is considered as the mastermind of killing Bengali intellectuals in Bangladesh liberation war.

When the Khmer Rouge ruled the country, they took Maoist theory to an extreme, driving the population from the cities, abolishing education, destroying factories and killing intellectuals, civil servants, monks and artists.

The militants, headed by the radical Islamic Group, have also killed Government officials, police, intellectuals and tourists in their drive to seize power.

Several thousand fundamentalists are held in Egyptian jails at the moment as a result of a two-year campaign by armed militants to kill intellectuals, Egyptian Christians, Government soldiers and tourists.

The death squads have emerged in response to violence by the militants, who have killed officials, intellectuals and members of the security forces as part of a campaign to topple the Government, the officials said.

In their pursuit of a pure Islamic state, the militants have been systematically killing intellectuals, writers, artists and journalists who oppose their goal.