Afghan officials hanged six Taliban prisoners Sunday, a resumption of executions in the war that makes good on President Ashraf Ghani’s recent promise to deal harshly with insurgents now that hopes for peace negotiations have evaporated.
(WashingtonPost)- The six prisoners were hanged in the morning inside the Pul-i-Charkhi prison — a detention facility on the outskirts of Kabul that is notorious among Afghans as the site of massive executions by the country’s then-communist regime during the 1980s.
Among the inmates were two Taliban members who helped assassinate two senior government officials in recent years, officials said.
One prisoner facilitated a 2011 suicide bomb attack on Burhanuddin Rabbani, who served as temporary president in Afghanistan after U.S. forces toppled the Taliban government 10 years earlier.
The second Taliban member was involved in the 2009 suicide bomb assassination of Abdullah Laghmani, the deputy chief of the country’s National Directorate of Security.
Government officials said all of the executed prisoners had been found guilty of crimes against “civilian national security.”
Ghani signed the order of execution in response to “repeated demands of the families of victims of terrorist attacks,” palace officials said in a statement.
The hangings come amid increasing concerns over security in Afghanistan. Taliban forces, aided by the increasingly influential Haqqani network, have vowed widespread attacks across Afghanistan on the heels of a robust spring poppy harvest — a main source of income for the insurgent group through the heroin black market.