PESHAWAR, Pakistan, 16 March 2007 — Pro-Taleban extremists in a Pakistani tribal area stoned and then shot dead two men and a woman for alleged adultery, officials and witnesses said yesterday.
Some 800 tribesmen watched the executions by the Lashkar-e-Islam (Army of Islam) group on Wednesday in the Khyber tribal district on the border with Afghanistan, they said.
The trio was tied up with ropes, and tribal elders and other men gathered at a patch of open ground and stoned them. Two masked members of the hard-line group then shot them with Kalashnikov rifles, witnesses said.
The killings are likely to fuel concern about the “Talebanization” of parts of Pakistan, particularly in the tribal areas and in North West Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan. “The Lashkar-e-Islam men caught them and after investigations it was proved that they were guilty of adultery,” a group member told AFP on condition of anonymity.
A jirga in the Khyber tribal agency near the Afghan border ordered the execution of the three on Wednesday, two days after they were caught and handed over to the council for judgment, residents said. “Allah Noor, Shehzad and the woman, Taslima, were caught red-handed in a compromising position by activists of the Lashkar-e-Islam religious group,” said Khiyal Mat Shah, a resident of the area.
Hundreds of people threw stones at them in an open area on Wednesday before relatives of the two accused men shot them dead, Shah said.
A government official in the area, 16 km southwest of Peshawar, said the accused had confessed to the jirga, and authorities had not intervened. “We do not get involved in such matters which are decided by jirgas themselves,” said Mohammad Iqbal, an official at the political administrator’s office.
Members of the religious group, led by Mangal Bagh, raided a house on Monday and abducted the three after local residents suspected them of “illicit” activities, local residents in the Bara region said.
