Afghanistan | Four men publicly executed by Taliban with relatives of victims shooting them 'six or seven times' at sport stadium

Four men have been publicly executed by the Taliban, with relatives of their victims shooting them several times in front of spectators at a sport stadium.

Two men were shot around six to seven times by a male relative of the victims in front of spectators in Qala-i-Naw, the centre of Afghanistan's Badghis province, witnesses told an AFP journalist in the city. 

The men had been 'sentenced to retaliatory punishment' for shooting other men, after their cases were 'examined very precisely and repeatedly', the statement said. 

'The families of the victims were offered amnesty and peace but they refused.'

Afghans had been invited to 'attend the event' in official notices shared widely on Thursday.

A third man was executed in Zaranj in Nimroz province, the Supreme Court said in a statement posted on social media platform X. 

A fourth man was publicly executed in another sports stadium, in the Farah province, on Friday, the country's Supreme Court said.

These executions have brought the number of public capital punishments to ten since the Taliban's return to power in 2021.

Corporal punishment - mainly flogging - has been common under the Taliban authorities and employed for crimes including theft, adultery and alcohol consumption.

The last execution was in November 2024, when a convicted murderer was killed by gunfire at a stadium in Gardez, the capital of Paktia province.

The condemned man was shot with three bullets to the chest by a member of the victim's family in front of thousands of spectators, including high-ranking Taliban officials.  

Public executions were common during the Taliban's first rule from 1996 to 2001, with most of them carried out publicly in sports stadiums.

All execution orders are signed by the Taliban's reclusive Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada who resides in the movement's heartland of Kandahar.

In 2022, Akhundzada ordered judges to fully implement all aspects of the Taliban government's interpretation of Islamic law - including 'eye for an eye' punishments known as 'qisas', allowing for the death penalty in retribution for the crime of murder.

Law and order is central to the severe ideology of the Taliban, which emerged from the chaos of a civil war following the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989.

One of the most infamous images from their first rule depicted the 1999 execution of a woman wearing an all-covering burqa in a Kabul stadium.

She had been accused of killing her husband.

The United Nations and rights groups such as Amnesty International have condemned the Taliban government's use of corporal punishment and the death penalty.

Amnesty included Afghanistan in countries where 'death sentences were known to have been imposed after proceedings that did not meet international fair trial standards', the non-governmental organisation said in its annual report on death sentences, published in April.

The report said Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia were responsible for 91 percent of known executions last year, with increases in death sentences in all three countries spurring a global rise.

The 1,518 executions recorded worldwide in 2024 did not include thousands of people believed to have been executed in China - the world's leading executioner, Amnesty said.

Source: Mail Online, Myriam Kueper, April 11, 2025

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde