KABUL, 5 October 2005 — Afghan authorities have detained the editor of a women’s rights magazine on the orders of a presidential adviser who deemed one of his articles blasphemous to Islam, a senior government official said yesterday. Mohaqiq Nasab, editor in chief of “Hoqooq-e-Zan,” or Women’s Rights, was detained last Thursday on instructions from a religious adviser to Western-backed President Hamid Karzai, the official said.

Fazel Sangcharaki, a deputy minister at the Ministry of Information and Culture, said he did not know the name of the adviser but Karzai’s religious adviser is Mohaiuddin Baloch, who could not immediately be reached for comment. Sangcharaki said Nasab’s arrest was technically illegal as the government-appointed media commission to question him before deciding whether he deserved to be jailed or freed.

In his article, the 50-year-old Nasab questioned the need for harsh Islamic punishment for apostates, thieves, adulterers and murderers, Sangcharaki said. Under traditional Islamic, or Shariah laws, apostates and murderers should be executed, a thief has a hand amputated and adulterers be publicly stoned. Such practices were common during the rule of the radical Islamist Taleban from 1996 until their 2001 overthrow by US-led forces for harboring the Al-Qaeda network and its chief, Osama Bin Laden, architect of Sept. 11 attacks on US cities. Although Afghanistan is still an Islamic country and retains Shariah law, its punishments are rarely enforced, and Islamic scholars have often voiced anger about this.

Meanwhile, three people were killed when a bomb exploded at an Afghan security post on the border with Pakistan yesterday while security forces shot dead five suspected Taleban militants in separate encounters, officials said. The blast was at the Spin Boldak border post in the restive southern province of Kandahar, one of the areas hardest hit by a Taleban insurgency launched after the fundamentalist regime was removed from power in late 2001.

“The explosion seemed to have been fairly big,” Spin Boldak police chief Abdul Wasay told AFP after visiting the site of the blast. “Twenty people have been wounded. Two children and a woman have been killed,” he said. Flames surrounded the blast site and the border was closed, said an AFP reporter in the Pakistani town of Chaman just across the border.

Wasay blamed the attack on “the enemies of Afghanistan,” a term often used by officials to refer to Taleban insurgents.