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Executions And Cutting Off Of Hands Will Return: Taliban Leader

He dismissed outrage over the Taliban’s executions in the past and warned the world against interfering

Kabul: Taliban leader Mullah Nooruddin Turabi has said the militant group will once again carry out executions and amputations of hands in Afghanistan, saying, “Cutting off of hands is very necessary for security.”

He dismissed outrage over the Taliban’s executions in the past and warned the world against interfering with Afghanistan’s new rulers.

“Everyone criticized us for the punishments in the stadium, but we have never said anything about their laws and their punishments,” Turabi told The Associated Press, speaking in Kabul. “No one will tell us what our laws should be. We will follow Islam and we will make our laws on the Quran,” he added.

In this week’s interview with the AP, Turabi spoke to a woman journalist. “We are changed from the past,” he said.

During the previous Taliban rule, he was one of the group’s most ferocious and uncompromising enforcers. Now, under the new Taliban government, he oversees prisons. He is among the members of the all-male interim Cabinet, who are on a United Nations sanctions list.

Turabi’s comments pointed to how the group’s leaders remain entrenched in a deeply conservative, hard-line worldview, even if they are embracing technological changes, like video and mobile phones.

He said that the Taliban would allow television, mobile phones, photos, and video “because this is the necessity of the people, and we are serious about it.” He suggested that the Taliban saw the media as a way to spread their message. “Now we know instead of reaching just hundreds, we can reach millions. If punishments are made public, then people may be allowed to video or take photos to spread the deterrent effect,” he added.

Turabi, now in his early 60s, was justice minister and head of the so-called Ministry of Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, simply known as religious police during the Taliban’s previous rule.

At that time, the world denounced the Taliban’s punishments, which took place in Kabul’s sports stadium or on the grounds of the sprawling Eid Gah Mosque, often attended by hundreds of Afghan men.

The punishment for convicted murders was executions were usually by a single shot to the head. Whereas, for convicted thieves, the punishment was amputation of a hand. For those convicted of highway robbery, a hand and a foot were amputated.

Wearing a white turban and a bushy, unkempt white beard, the stocky Turabi limped slightly on his artificial leg. He lost a leg and one eye during fighting with Soviet troops in the 1980s.

“Cutting off of hands is very necessary for security,” he said, saying it had a deterrent effect. He said the Cabinet was studying whether to do punishments in public and will “develop a policy.”

Previously, trials and convictions were rarely public and the judiciary was weighted in favour of Islamic clerics, whose knowledge of the law was limited to religious injunctions.

However, this time Turabi said that judges including women would adjudicate cases, but the foundation of Afghanistan’s laws will be the Quran. He said the same punishments would be revived.

On at least two occasions in the last week, Taliban fighters have revived a punishment they commonly used in the past — public shaming of men accused of small-time theft.

In one case, their faces were painted to identify them as thieves. In the other, stale bread was hung from their necks or stuffed in their mouth. It was not immediately clear what their crimes were.

The U.S. and its allies have been trying to use the threat of isolation and the economic damage that would result from it to pressure the Taliban to moderate their rule and give other factions, minorities, and women a place in power.

But Turabi dismissed criticism over the previous Taliban rule, arguing that it had succeeded in bringing stability. “We had complete safety in every part of the country,” he said of the late 1990s.

Turabi was notorious for ripping music tapes from cars, stringing up hundreds of meters of destroyed cassettes in trees and signposts. He demanded men wear turbans in all government offices and his minions routinely beat men whose beards had been trimmed. Sports were banned, and Turabi’s legion of enforcers forced men to the mosque for prayers five times daily.

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