UPDATED! 22 Year Old Woman Accused of Adultery Executed in Afghanistan

Posted: July 9th, 2012 | Author: Michael Courtenay | Filed under: CRIME!, Hard Pill to Swallow, Honour Killing, Standout | Tags: Afghanistan, Domestic Abuse, Ghazni Province, Mohammad Arif, Taliban, UK Honour Killing, Ultra-conservative Muslim state, Violent Crimes Against Women, Women's Rights | Comments Off

Horrific video footage has once again emerged – from Afghanistan – showing a 22 year-old woman being shot in front of a crowd of cheering men.

In the three-minute video, a man approaches the woman – who is knelt in the dirt – and shoots her five times at close range with an automatic rifle, to cheers of jubilation from the 100 or so people watching in a village.

Local officials say the woman was married to a senior member of a hardline Taliban militant group and was accused of adultery with another Taliban commander, either through a romantic relationship, or rape.

WANING! The following Video contains scenes of graphic violence, it is not suitable for children ::::

WARNING! Graphic Violence

Reportedly the 22-year-old named Najiba, had committed adultery and was sentenced to death just hours before by Taliban members. A man is seen reading verses from the Koran condemning adultery, before saying: “We cannot forgive her, God tells us to finish her”.

As the young woman squats, huddled in a burka facing away from the camera, a man walks up behind her to within a few feet and opens fire with his assault rifle.

The first two shots apparently miss her, but with the third shot she collapses, the gunman continues to fire into her motionless body. The crowd looking on from a hill, cheer her death, shouting “Long live Islam”, “Long live Mujahideen”.

Najiba had been married to one Taliban member and was accused of adultery with a Taliban commander, according to Roshna Khalid, Parwan’s provincial spokesman. “Within one hour they decided that she was guilty and sentenced her to death. They shot her in front of villagers in her village,” she told the AFP.

Afghanistan’s Ambassador To Australia Condemns Feudal Killing

UPDATE! 11 July 2012: The Afghan ambassador to Australia has described the video of a woman executed for adultery as “ghastly” and says it is an example of the ongoing struggle for the future of Afghanistan. In an interview with ABC radio, Nasir Ahmad Andisha says he was shocked when he saw the video, as it occurred in one of the war-torn country’s more peaceful provinces.

“We are very shocked and moved by what happened in that video, the execution of that woman. It’s probably the most ghastly act of the Taliban and the extremist groups in Afghanistan,” Mr Andisha said. ”The information I got yesterday was from the governor of that province, which is relatively peaceful province of Afghanistan, and that’s why we’re surprised to see this kind of atrocity.”

Mr Andisha said the woman was brutally murdered as part of a feud between two Taliban commanders in the region.

“She was executed by one of these commanders with whom she was living for many months, and it was just to cover up his fears of the other rival groups,” Mr Andisha said. ”Before this illegal relationship would get into the wider community he decided to execute her. And for that he just recruited a number of villagers, mainly his supporters, and we saw in the video this person himself, according to the government, was implementing the execution.”

The ambassador said the man, and those involved, must be brought to justice to serve as example that such behaviour is not tolerated.

“Security forces are following this person, they are already in that village, and they have arrested a couple of people who have witnessed that issue,” Mr Andisha said. ”But it doesn’t shift any responsibility of our government to look after these cases in a robust manner. We have to bring these perpetrators to justice, and we have to make a good example for the others, to show you can not go free after committing this sort of atrocity.”

Mr Andisha said the horrific killing highlights the ongoing struggle Afghans face on a daily basis between the “forces of progress and the forces of backwardness”.

“The larger picture is that there’s a struggle going on in Afghanistan, a battle is continuing between the Afghan forces, NATO forces and the Taliban and their supporters,” Mr Andisha said. ”But then there is a larger war going on, that war is the war of ideas, the war of backwardness versus the war of forwardness. The war of civil society, which is governed by the rule of law, by institutions, by law which is applicable to everyone, against a group of people who want to keep the country in the middle ages. They want to keep them in the ways of the Taliban, where anyone can take the law into their own hands and try to execute it they way they want to do it.”

Mr Andisha said education is the key to avoid a return to the bloody rule of the Taliban.

“We need a generational change, we have 8 million people at school, so we need these children to go to school and to finish up and to to come into the society as the people who’ve got a modern education, who understand the rule of law…. who really appreciate the universal values of human rights,” Mr Andisha said. ”For the Taliban and the forces of backwardness, that’s why they’re burning the schools, because a person who has gone to school will never join their ranks. The would never want to witness atrocities like this, they may stand against them.”

The ambassador said the backlash against attempts by the Taliban to close schools across the country gives him hope there will be a similar reaction to the woman’s murder.

“We have witnessed ordinary people in the past two to three months who are standing against the Taliban who are closing the schools,” Mr Andisha said. “Ordinary people are standing against the Taliban and clearing their own regions of the Taliban because they closed the clinics. And I am sure there might be an outcry of ordinary people in the same districts where this case happened, because it puts them in the spotlight, and [gives a sense of] shame for the people in that village.”

Taliban Denies Any Role in Woman’s Execution

UPDATED! 12 July 2012: The Taliban has denied any involvement in the recent public execution of a 22 year old woman, captured in a horrific youtube video that caused international outrage.

Afghan authorities blamed the Taliban for killing the 22-year-old woman for adultery, as was common during their rule of the country between 1996 and 2001.

She was shot dead as dozens of men cheered in a village about 100 kilometres north of the capital Kabul.

But the Taliban said in a statement on their website that they had investigated the incident and found the woman was “killed by the decision of the local residents”.

“The involvement of the… mujahideen as alleged by some officials of the Kabul government is absolutely untrue and baseless,” the statement said.

President Hamid Karzai condemned the execution as un-Islamic and unforgivable and security forces have launched a manhunt for those responsible.

The US commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan, General John Allen, offered to help local security forces track down and capture the men involved in what he called “an atrocity of unspeakable cruelty”.