The Taliban hanged a dead body from a crane parked in a city square in Afghanistan on Saturday in a gruesome display that signaled the hardline movement’s return to some of its brutal tactics of the past.
Taliban officials initially brought four bodies to the central square in the western city of Herat, then moved three of them to other parts of the city for public display, said Wazir Ahmad Seddiqi, who runs a pharmacy on the edge of the square.
Taliban officials announced that the four were caught taking part in a kidnapping earlier on Saturday and were killed by police, Seddiqi said.
Photo: AP
Ziaulhaq Jalali, a district police chief in Herat who was appointed by the Taliban, said later that Taliban members rescued a father and son who had been abducted by four kidnappers after an exchange of gunfire.
Jalali said that a Taliban fighter and a civilian were wounded by the kidnappers, and that the kidnappers were killed in crossfire.
A video showed crowds gathering around the crane and peering up at the body as some men chanted.
“The aim of this action is to alert all criminals that they are not safe,” a Taliban commander who did not identify himself said in an interview conducted in the square.
Since the Taliban seized control of the country on Aug. 15, Afghans and the world have been watching to see whether they will recreate their harsh rule of the late 1990s, which included public stonings and limb amputations of alleged criminals, some of which took place in front of large crowds at a stadium.
After one of the Taliban’s founders said that the hardline movement would once again carry out executions and amputations of hands, the US Department of State said that such acts “would constitute clear gross abuses of human rights.”
State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters on Friday that the US would “stand firm with the international community to hold perpetrators of these — of any such abuses — accountable.”
The Taliban’s leaders remain entrenched in a deeply conservative, hardline worldview, even if they are embracing technological changes, such as video and mobile phones.
“Everyone criticized us for the punishments in the stadium, but we have never said anything about their laws and their punishments,” Mullah Nooruddin Turabi said. “No one will tell us what our laws should be. We will follow Islam and we will make our laws on the Koran.”
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