The Taliban have shot four alleged kidnappers and hung their bodies in a public square in Herat a day after the Taliban official said that extreme punishments of execution and amputation would resume.
Taliban’s local official said the men were executed in an armed battle after they allegedly seized a businessman and his son.
Local residents said that a body was hung from a crane in the city of Herat.
A local shopkeeper of Herat Wazir Ahmad Seddiqi said that four bodies were brought to the center of the city, one was hung there and the three other bodies were moved to other squares of the city in order to be executed and displayed there.
The deputy governor of Herat, Maulwai Shair, said displaying the bodies was done to deter further abductions. He said the men were killed in a gun battle after the Taliban learned that they had kidnapped a businessman and his son – who were both freed.
The circumstances under which the men were killed are confirmed by graphic images shared on social media that appeared to show bloody bodies on the back of a pick-up truck with a crane hoisting one man up.
Another video showed a man suspended from a crane with a sign on his chest reading: “Abductors will be punished like this.”
Since taking power in Afghanistan on 15 August, the Taliban have been promising a milder form of a rule than the rule in their previous tenure. However, these recent incidents narrate a contrasting story.
Earlier, The Taliban’s former head of religious police Mullah Nooruddin Turabi who is in charge of prisons said on Thursday that extreme punishments would resume in Afghanistan as they were ‘necessary for security’ adding that “No one will tell us what our laws should be.”
In an interview, he said that these punishments might not be carried out in public, as they were under previous Taliban rule in the 1990s.
Public executions were frequently held in Kabul’s sports stadium or on the vast grounds of the Eid Gah mosque during the group’s five-year rule.
Turabi who is also on a UN sanctions list added that everyone had criticized us for the punishments but the Taliban had never said anything about the laws and punishments of the countries critical about them.
