Five Aghans executed over rape

The five men were hanged in the Puli Charkhi prison on the outskirts of the capital, Kabul, on Wednesday, the Afghan attorney general's office announced.

"Five men in connection to the Paghman incident and one other big criminal were executed this afternoon," Rahmatullah Nazari, the deputy attorney general, told the news agency AFP. The sixth man was hanged for unrelated kidnapping offensives.

In a nationally televised court case that lasted just a few hours, the men were found guilty last month of the gang rape and armed robbery of four women.

The women were returning from a wedding in the Paghman district on August 23 when eight men - some of them wearing police uniforms - flagged down their car and sexually assaulted them. Police are still searching for the other three attackers.

The brutal assault and the case that followed sparked a public outcry, with many calling for the perpetrators to be given the death sentence.

President Hamid Karzai signed the execution order on his last day in office, before handing power over to Ashraf Ghani, who has pledged to reform the justice system during his term.

Justice concerns

The rights group Amnesty International and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR) had raised concerns about the fairness of the trial. For example, there had been allegations that the men confessed under torture and that Karzai had demanded the men be hanged even before the case was heard.

In a statement issued from Geneva ahead of the executions on Wednesday, the UNHCR "called on President Ghani to refer the cases back to the courts given the very serious due process concerns."

According to Amnesty, the trial was rushed, giving defense lawyers little time to prepare, and was "marred by inconsistencies, uninvestigated torture claims and political interference."

The European Union also lodged an objection to the death sentences.

nm/mkg (AP, AFP, dpa)