- It is the third death penalty carried out by the Taliban in just a few days
- Nazar Muhammad was found guilty of murder with a knife in January 2022
- Amnesty International has condemned the Taliban’s death penalty policy
Taliban authorities publicly executed a convicted murderer by gunfire at a sports stadium on Monday, officials said, the third death penalty carried out in Afghanistan in several days.
The man – found guilty of a knife murder in January 2022 – was executed in the northern city of Sheberghan on a death warrant signed by Taliban chief Hibatullah Akhundzada, a Supreme Court statement said.
The statement identified the convicted man as Nazar Muhammad and said his case was “very thoroughly and repeatedly investigated.”
He was shot five times in front of his victim’s family – including women and children – and thousands of spectators at the stadium, a local provincial official told AFP.
Since the Taliban’s return in August 2021, a handful of executions have taken place in line with their government’s austere vision of Islam.
Illustrative image shows an alleged murderer being executed in front of a crowd in Kabul in 1998
Akhundzada ordered judges in 2022 to fully implement all aspects of Islamic law, including “eye for an eye” punishments known as “qisas.”
Under the Taliban government’s interpretation of Islamic law, the provisions allow for the death penalty in retaliation for the crime of murder.
Last week, two other men were executed by multiple gunshots to the back in the eastern city of Ghazni, on death warrants also signed by Akhundzada.
According to an AFP count, five death sentences have now been carried out since the Taliban’s return.
However, corporal punishment – mainly flogging – is common and is used for crimes such as theft, adultery and alcohol consumption.
Amnesty International last week called the Taliban government’s death penalty policy “a gross affront to human dignity.”
“Conducting executions in public contributes to the inherent cruelty of the death penalty,” the report said in a statement.
According to Amnesty International, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United States were respectively the world’s most prolific practitioners of the death penalty in 2022.
A Taliban fighter looks on as he stands near the city of Ghazni, Afghanistan, August 14, 2021
Law and order are central to the Taliban’s strict ideology, which emerged from the chaos of a civil war following the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in 1989.
During their first rule, from 1996 to 2001, public executions were common.
One of the most infamous images from that era depicted the 1999 execution of a woman wearing an all-covering burqa in a stadium in Kabul. She was accused of killing her husband.