Couple Stoned to Death By Taliban

The Taliban ordered A young couple that had eloped in Northern Afghanistan to be executed by stoning on Sunday.

According to reports from Taliban sympathetic sources, the execution was carried out by the couple’s family and neighbors, and by hundreds of other villagers in Kunduz Province.

The couple was apparently defiant as their sentence was read, insisting that they loved each other no matter what happened.

The family of the victims were not only involved in the stoning, but tricked the couple into returning home to be killed. The lovers, a 25-year-old man named Khayyam and a 19-year-old woman named Siddiqa, had eloped to Kunar Province, where distant relations took them in after their families refused to let them wed. They returned home after phone calls and repeated assurances from their family that the marriage was now accepted.

The couple was seized by the Taliban when they returned home, and local Mullahs were convened into a religious court. Siddiqa was the only woman present in a crowd that some estimates put over 200. Reports indicate that Taliban activists threw the first stones, but that the villagers joined in until the couple was dead.

Afghan authorities confirmed the murders on Monday. Mahbubullah Sayedi, a spokesman for the Kunduz governor’s office, spoke out against the stoning, saying, “We have courts here, and we can solve such cases through our judicial organizations. This act is against human rights and against our national Constitution.”

This was the first public stoning death by the Taliban since it fell from power nine years ago. It also occurred in the north, far from the Taliban’s usual home bases.

Also troubling from a United States point of view, is the support that such actions seem to have in the mainstream religious authorities in Afghanistan. The national Ulema Council issued a statement calling for the use of more Shariah punishments, such as lashes, stoning, and amputation.