The Taliban have reportedly hanged a dead body from a crane in the main square of Herat city in western Afghanistan.
A witness told the Associated Press that four bodies were brought to the square and three bodies were moved to other squares in the city for display.
The business owner said the Taliban had announced in the square that the four were caught taking part in a kidnapping and had been killed by police.
Mullah Nooruddin Turabi, one of the founders of the Taliban and the chief enforcer of its harsh interpretation of Islamic law when they last ruled Afghanistan, told The Associated Press this week that the hard-line movement will once again carry out executions and amputations of hands, though perhaps not in public.
Since the Taliban overran Kabul on August 15th and seized control of the country, Afghans and the world have been watching to see whether they will recreate their harsh rule of the late 1990s.
The group’s leaders remain entrenched in a deeply conservative, hard-line worldview, even if they are embracing technological changes such as video and mobile phones. – AP