KABUL, 30 March 2005 — An Afghan housewife involved in a car theft gang is to stand trial on charges of murdering 27 men, including her husband, officials said yesterday.
Sherin Gul, her son, her lover and four other accomplices were arrested several months ago and confessed to being behind the serial killings, law enforcement officials said.
Gul and her gang preyed mostly on taxi drivers in the eastern city of Jalalabad and the capital Kabul, Judge Abdul Bari Bakhtyari, chief of the court for crimes against national and foreign security, told Reuters. “She would hire a taxi saying she wanted to take a sick person from her house to the hospital,” Bakhtyari said.
“Then she would invite the driver in and offer him tea, telling him it would only take couple of minutes to get to the hospital. She would put sedatives in the tea to knock out the driver, and then she would kill him.” The victims were strangled to death with a rope, according to police officials.
Seventeen bodies were discovered at Gul’s house in Jalalabad, while the others were found at her other house in Kabul, he said. “Her husband was among the dead, though she seems to have killed him over some disagreement. The others were killed for their cars or their money,” he added.
Gul, aged between 35 and 45 years and from Jalalabad, is now being held at Kabul’s Pul-e-Charkhi prison. “She and her accomplices will be tried in the near future,” Bakhtyari said, but he did not know what punishment the accused might face if they are found guilty.
Meanwhile, waters swamped large parts of the central Afghanistan town of Ghazni yesterday and several nearby villages were inundated after a dam was breached following heavy rains and melting snows. Up to six people were feared killed and US-led forces joined an evacuation effort using helicopters to clear downstream areas.
Abdul Rahman, police chief of Ghazni province, told Reuters that many shops and houses had been destroyed. Waters from the ruptured Band-e-Sultan dam flooded the streets of Ghazni town and inundated villages along the banks of the Ghazni river, although an alert broadcast by radio had helped minimize casualties, other officials said.
