Public stonings to death in Afghanistan from August 2010 seen on Live Leak video, very graphic. Enthusiastic crowd of 200 attended the event, many throwing big stones at a burka covered woman on the edge of a pit. The man is stoned after the woman, at the end you see blood.
1/27/2011, "Afghanistan Officials Promise Investigation After Video Surfaces of Stoning Deaths," Zimbio.com
"In the video a Taliban leader explains to a crowd of roughly 200 people last August (2010) that a couple deserves to die because they were committed to other people when they eloped together.
WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT: Click here to see a very graphic version of the video.
WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT: Click here to see a less graphic version of the video.
Dozens of men then throw rocks at the woman, who stands in a four foot hole, while yelling “Allah akbar.” But despite being clobbered for two minutes by countless large stones that left her burqa soaked in blood, the woman, identified as Siddqa,
survives the stoning and is eventually shot by a spectator with an AK-47.
The man, Khayyam, is then brought out, blindfolded and subjected to an even more ferocious attack with even larger stones as he lies face down on the floor....
"Hundreds of people attended the stoning but no-one was charged."...
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Per Pew Poll, 82% of Egyptian Muslims favor stoning to death for adultery, 12/2/2010 poll. (Scroll down for chart)
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In a 2010 BBC report Karzai says stoning could be done but must go through proper channels:
8/16/10, "Taliban 'kill adulterous Afghan couple'," BBC
"A spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Waheed Omar, said if the incident (stoning to death) was confirmed it would be condemned in the strongest terms by the government.
- "Even in Islam this [stoning] has to be done
- through proper judicial systems," he said....
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"It (stoning) still exists on the law books in Afghanistan, Iran, sections of Nigeria, Pakistan, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates."... . (A BBC article linked in the above story conveys it as unique to the Taliban, which is not accurate).
7/8/10, "Where is stoning legal, and how is it done?" MSNBC and news service reports
- Stoning is part of sharia law in many places.
Ayatollah Shahroudi, the head of Iran’s judiciary, ...in 2002 said stoning should no longer exist in Iranian law. Despite Shahroudi’s stance, stoning continues to remain on the law books in Iran and
- lower judges are free to sentence adulterers to that method of punishment."
12/6/10, "Majority of Muslims want Islam in politics, poll says," LA Times, Meris Lutz
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10/11/11, "AP Exclusive: Afghanistan obstructs graft probes," AP, by Goldman and Vogt
"A major investigation into an influential Afghan governor accused of taking bribes has been shut down and its top prosecutor transferred to a unit that doesn't handle corruption cases, Afghan and U.S. officials said. The closing of the investigation into the former governor of Kapisa province, Ghulam Qawis Abu Bakr, comes on the heels of a grim, unpublicized assessment by U.S. officials that no substantive corruption prosecutions were taking place in Afghanistan despite President Hamid Karzai's pledge to root out graft."...
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9/25/11, "Government by crime syndicate," LA Times, Sarah Chayes
"...the latest manifestation of a worldwide explosion of outrage at what historians may someday come to deem humanity's latest form of tyranny: the capture of states by criminal syndicates. Otherwise known as rampant public corruption.
In early 2010, I was asked to make a presentation to a counter-narcotics symposium at the Marshall Center in Germany. In attendance were several hundred high-ranking military and law enforcement officers from around the world. I dutifully explained the opium economy in Afghanistan, which I've had a chance to observe during nearly a decade living and working in Kandahar. But I could not resist inserting two slides at the end of the talk. They depicted the phenomenon that really interests me: the increasingly structured capture of the Afghan government by what amounts to a set of interlocking, vertically integrated criminal networks.
.
I have watched the phenomenon evolve over the last 10 years. At first, there was a furtive testing of the limits, as Kalashnikov-toting ruffians shook down travelers for "sweets" (as extorted bribes are prudishly called). Over time, the corruption expanded and evolved, and today, Afghanistan is controlled by a structured, mafiaesque system, in which money flows upward via purchase of office, kickbacks or "sweets" in return for permission to extract resources (of which more varieties exist in impoverished Afghanistan than one might think) and protection in case of legal or international scrutiny. Those foolish enough to raise objections are punished. The result is a system that selects for criminality, excluding
- and marginalizing the very men and women of probity
- most needed to build a sustainable state.
I was stunned. For so long had my nose been buried in Afghanistan and its peculiarities that I had not realized I was experiencing just a sliver of a global phenomenon. As I spoke to these symposium participants (who came from Nigeria, the former Soviet republics, Pakistan and elsewhere), I couldn't help but notice a correlation between mafia government and the existence of violent religious extremism. And I realized that the phenomenon of public corruption — often pooh-poohed or viewed as a part of the ambient "culture" of South Asians, or Muslims or whomever —
- poses a substantial threat to international security.
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