Kabul: Afghans, encouraged by President Hamid Karzai's decision to execute seven convicted criminals this month, are calling for a return to Taliban-era public executions to deal with a surge in crime.
Rights groups and some of the governments funding post-Taliban Afghanistan recoiled at the executions, the first batch in a year, saying shortcomings in the notoriously inefficient and corrupt judicial system cast doubt on the legitimacy of trials.
But Afghans wholeheartedly welcomed them, with one newspaper praising the move in an editorial entitled "Thank you, Mr President."
A council of women in the capital late last month called on Karzai to go one step further and have death sentences, usually by firing squad or hanging carried out in public, as they were under the 1996-2001 Taliban regime.
The president said at the time this was not something he would support. But at the weekend he told reporters he would consider public executions for those behind an acid attack on schoolgirls in the southern city of Kandahar last week.
If advised by the Supreme Court and religious clerics, "I will accept public execution so people can see those who have carried out such barbaric acts... Are executed in front of the world's eyes," he said.
Meanwhile the religious council for provinces in western Afghanistan last week issued a statement calling for, among other things, public executions "as a lesson" to criminals.
This would "put horror and fear in the hearts of criminals and those who plan crime, and crime will decrease," the council's spokesman, Farooq Hussaini, explained to AFP.
