Taliban kills pair for trying to elope

KABUL -- A Taliban firing squad killed a couple in southwestern Afghanistan for trying to elope, shooting them in front of a crowd in a militant-controlled region, officials said Tuesday.

The woman, 19-year-old Gul Pecha, and the man, 21-year-old Abdul Aziz, were accused of immoral acts, and a council of conservative clerics decided they should be killed, officials said.

The two had hoped to travel to Iran, but their parents sent villagers to bring them home, said Sadiq Chakhansori, the chief of the provincial council.

Once back home, the pair was either turned over to the Taliban by their parents or the militants took them by force, the officials said, providing varying accounts.

Riflemen in the remote district of Khash Rod shot them Monday, said Chakhansori.

"Unfortunately, Khash Rod is an area that is almost out of the control of the government," said Gov. Ghulam Dastagir Azad. "We don't have coalition or Afghan army forces there like we do in other districts."

The U.S. has 38,000 forces in Afghanistan, and President Barack Obama recently announced that the U.S. would send 21,000 more troops to the country this summer.

But in remote and dangerous regions of Afghanistan, Taliban fighters operate what are sometimes referred to as shadow governments, where militant leaders serve as government officials and run their own police units and pseudo court systems.

The conservative Taliban movement ruled Afghanistan from 1996-2001 and put in place harsh social rules that forbade unmarried men and women to talk or meet in public. Women were not allowed out of their homes without a male relative, and girls couldn't go to school.

Taliban fighters have widened their influence the last three years and now control many remote districts in Afghanistan where there are not enough U.S., NATO or Afghan forces to establish a permanent presence.

The Nimroz governor decried the fact that a three-person council of clerics operating outside the state's judicial system would level the death penalty.

"Through legal channels it would take months to prove such a case," Azad said. "How can these people make a decision in four days and kill them? No one has the right to kill anybody without the decision of a court."

Pecha, the woman, was an ethnic Pashtun from the region and a member of the Sunni sect of Islam, Azad said. Aziz was from the Shiite sect, Azad said, though he didn't know his ethnicity.

Nader Nadery, a spokesman for the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, said the killings were the "worst act against mankind" and "completely against the principles of human rights."