Taliban authorities in the western Afghan city of Herat killed four alleged kidnappers and hung their bodies up in public to deter others, a local government official has said, in a sign of Afghanistan’s new rulers’ return to their harsh version of Islamic justice.
Graphic footage shows the dead bodies of at least four men with their clothes covered in blood hanging from cranes in the city’s main squares as people watch.
“Whoever kidnaps others, will end up like this,” is written in a note on the chest of the bodies.
Ziaulhaq Jalali, a Taliban-appointed district police chief in Herat, said Taliban members had rescued a father and son who had been abducted by four kidnappers after an exchange of gunfire. He said a Taliban fighter and a civilian were wounded by the kidnappers but “the four (alleged kidnappers) were killed in crossfire”.
The Taliban brought the bodies to four main squares of the city and asked the people to gather around, people in the ancient city near the border with Iran said.
“I was talking with a customer when I saw Taliban bring two dead bodies on the back of a ranger vehicle,” Ahmadi, a mobile phone seller said. “Then they told the people that from now on this is what will happen to anyone who kidnaps people. Many started chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’ as a crane hanged the body.”
“I was in a taxi and going towards the downtown when I saw the Taliban had used a crane to hang a dead body,” said another resident of the city.
“People were running to see it. I was watching it through the taxi’s back window. Then, when I arrived at the next square, I saw another man hanging from a crane … a body was hanging in square after square. I’m still in shock.”
The public hangings come a day after a senior Taliban official said executions and the amputation of hands for criminals they convict will resume.
Mullah Nooruddin Turabi, one of the founders of the Taliban and the chief enforcer of its harsh interpretation of Islamic law when they last ruled Afghanistan, said this week that the Taliban will once again carry out executions and amputations of hands, though perhaps not in public.
“Everyone criticised us for the punishments in the stadium, but we have never said anything about their laws and their punishments,” Turabi told the Associated Press. “No one will tell us what our laws should be. We will follow Islam and we will make our laws on the Qur’an.”
Washington, which condemned Turabi’s reported comments on punishments, has said any potential recognition of the Taliban-led government in Kabul, which replaced the western-backed government that collapsed last month, would depend on respect for human rights.
According to the official Bakhtar news agency, eight kidnappers were also arrested in a separate incident in the south-western province of Uruzgan.
