Afghanistan's appeal court referred a reporter sentenced to death on blasphemy charges to a hospital yesterday for medical tests after he said he was tortured by security forces, who fractured his nose.
Perwiz Kambakhsh, arrested late October and sentenced to death in January, has denied the charges and alleged security forces used torture to force him into a confession.
His defense lawyer Mohammad Afzal Nuristani repeated the allegation in court yesterday and requested the 23-year-old reporter be referred to hospital for forensic tests.
PHOTO: AP
“My client has been tortured while in custody. He has suffered a fracture to his nose and damage to his wrist,” he said.
Judge Abdul Salam Qazaizada agreed to allow the reporter to undergo tests and adjourned the case until the results were available.
Kambakhsh was sentenced to death by a primary court in his hometown of Mazar-i-Sharif, where he is a university student of journalism and had worked on a small, local newspaper.
He was accused of distributing an article he downloaded from the Internet that questions the Koran’s views on women.
Kambakhsh’s case has prompted alarm from international media rights groups and governments and calls for Western-backed Afghan President Hamid Karzai to intervene.
Meanwhile, a remote-controlled bomb blew up early yesterday near a minivan taking Afghan army staff to work at a military academy in Kabul, killing a woman and wounding five other people, the defense ministry said.
The bomb was planted on an island in the center of the road in the west of the city and detonated as the Afghan National Army (ANA) bus passed, a ministry official said on condition of anonymity.
“Three ANA officers and two of our civilian compatriots were wounded and a woman was martyred,” a ministry statement said.
The targeted vehicle was damaged but not destroyed.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, the second in Kabul since a Taliban suicide blast on Thursday killed three civilians.
Thursday’s attack struck a convoy of the US-led coalition, which is helping Afghanistan defeat a Taliban insurgency and train its army.
The soldiers all survived, but three civilians were killed by the explosion, which blew a crater into the road and sent flesh and debris flying.
Another suicide attack struck NATO soldiers in the eastern city of Jalalabad on Saturday, killing two and wounding five.
The Taliban also claimed responsibility for the blast, in which five Afghan civilians were also hurt.
The new deaths took to 67 the number of international soldiers who have died in Afghanistan this year.
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