A court has dismissed the case against an Afghan man facing possible execution for converting from Islam to Christianity, officials said, paving the way for his release this week.
The move eased pressure from the West but raised the problem of protecting Abdul Rahman after his release, because Islamic clerics have called for him to be killed.
One official said freedom might come as soon as yesterday for Rahman, who became a Christian in the 1990s while working for an aid group in neighboring Pakistan.
Muslim extremists, who have demanded death for Rahman as an apostate for rejecting Islam, warned the decision would touch off protests across this religiously conservative country. Some clerics previously vowed to incite Afghans to kill Rahman if he was let go.
Rahman was moved to Kabul's notorious high-security Policharki prison on Friday after inmates at a jail in central Kabul threatened him, Policharki's warden, General Shahmir Amirpur, said.
Authorities have barred journalists from seeing Rahman. But on Sunday, officials gave reporters an exclusive tour of Policharki, which houses some 2,000 inmates, including about 350 Taliban and al-Qaeda militants.
Amirpur said Rahman had been asking guards for a Bible but they had none to give him.
"He looks very calm. But he keeps saying he is hearing voices," Amirpur said.
Rahman was in solitary confinement in a tiny concrete cell next to a senior prison guard's office. Reporters were shown the cell door, but barred from speaking with or otherwise communicating with him.
A senior guard said inmates and many guards had not been told of Rahman's identity because of fears they might attack him.
But Amirpur vouched for the prisoner's safety. "We are watching him constantly. This is a very sensitive case so he needs high security."
The case set off an outcry in the US and other nations that helped oust the hard-line Taliban regime in late 2001 and provide aid and military support for Afghan President Hamid Karzai. US President George W. Bush and others insisted Afghanistan protect personal beliefs.
A Supreme Court spokesman, Abdul Wakil Omeri, said the case had been dismissed because of "problems with the prosecutors' evidence." He said several of Rahman's relatives testified he is mentally unstable and prosecutors have to "decide if he is mentally fit to stand trial."
Another Afghan official closely involved with the case told the press that the court ruled there was insufficient evidence and returned the case to prosecutors for further investigation. But he said Rahman would be released in the meantime.
"The court dismissed today the case against Abdul Rahman for a lack of information and a lot of legal gaps in the case," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly comment on the case.
"The decision about his release will be taken possibly [yesterday]," the official added. "They don't have to keep him in jail while the attorney general is looking into the case."
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who said she had not received official confirmation from Afghan authorities, told Fox News the announcement was "a very good step forward."
But about 700 Muslim clerics and others gathered in central Mazar-e-Sharif, chanting "Death to Bush" and other anti-Western slogans, a day after a court announced it had dropped its case against Rahman, police commander Nasruddin Hamdrad said.
Security forces surrounded the demonstrators but did not intervene.
The religious leaders have called for protests across the country against both the government and the West, which had pressured Karzai's administration to drop the case.
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
‘HUMAN NEGLIGENCE’: The fire is believed to have been caused by someone who was visiting an ancestral grave and accidentally started the blaze, the acting president said Deadly wildfires in South Korea worsened overnight, officials said yesterday, as dry, windy weather hampered efforts to contain one of the nation’s worst-ever fire outbreaks. More than a dozen different blazes broke out over the weekend, with Acting South Korean Interior and Safety Minister Ko Ki-dong reporting thousands of hectares burned and four people killed. “The wildfires have so far affected about 14,694 hectares, with damage continuing to grow,” Ko said. The extent of damage would make the fires collectively the third-largest in South Korea’s history. The largest was an April 2000 blaze that scorched 23,913 hectares across the east coast. More than 3,000
RSS