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COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) -- South Carolina is executing an inmate for the first time in nearly two years.

Jeffrey Motts is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 6 p.m. Friday at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia.

Prison officials will use a different combination of drugs to kill Motts The state will replace sodium thiopental with pentobarbital after federal agents seized South Carolina's supply of sodium thiopental last month in a nationwide investigation into how prisons obtained the drug.

Motts, who turned 36 on Thursday, is being executed for strangling his cellmate at a Greenville County state prison in 2005, then dragging the body to a common area as a warning to snitches. He was serving a life sentence at the time for two murders in Spartanburg County 10 years earlier.

(Copyright 2011 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)