Tag Archives: fazalur rehman

1998: Three Afghan men under a toppled wall

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This jaw-dropping story, reported here via an Amnesty International report, made the rounds of international press and appears to be well-founded — and indeed not the only instance of execution by wall toppling in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.*

Three Afghan men, Fazalur Rehman, Ahmad Shah and Abdul Qahir were convicted earlier this year [1998] by a Taleban Shari’a court of committing sodomy with young boys. On 25 February 1998, a stone wall was felled on them by a battle tank before thousands of spectators at Kotal Morcha north of city of Kandahar. They were seriously injured but did not die immediately. The Taleban leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar who had reportedly gone to witness the execution ordered that they remain buried for half an hour saying their lives would be spared if they survived. As the men were still alive at the end of their ordeal, he ordered that they should be taken to the city’s hospital. Two of them died the next day. The third survived but it is not known if he is still in hospital. Agence France Presse quotes the Taleban’s daily newspaper, Anis, as reporting that the three men from the Sangin area in Helmand province, some 100 kilometres northwest of Kandahar, “who had committed the obscene act of buggery were publicly put under a wall after a verdict of the Shari’a court and the Shari’a punishment was thus applied to them. His eminence the Amirol Momenin [Mollah Mohammad Omar] attended the function to give Shari’a punishment to the three buggerers in Dasht-e Sufi area of Kandahar.”

* The same Amnesty report describes a like punishment visited on March 22, 1998, on Abdul Sami, 18, and Bismillah, 22 — again, for sodomy.

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