Ex-Afghan VP's brother executed: family says

Taliban `would not let us bury him'

The Taliban have executed the brother of Amrullah Saleh, the former Afghan vice-president who became one of the leaders of anti-Taliban opposition forces in the Panjshir valley, his nephew said on Friday.

The news that Rohullah Azizi was killed came days after Taliban forces took control of the provincial centre of Panjshir, the last province holding out against them.

“They executed my uncle,” Ebadullah Saleh told Reuters in a text message. “They killed him yesterday and would not let us bury him. They kept saying his body should rot.”

The Urdu language account of the Taliban information service Alemarah said that “according to reports” Rohullah Saleh was killed during fighting in Panjshir.

Saleh, a former head of the National Directorate of Security, the intelligence service of the Western-backed government that collapsed last month, is at large though his exact location remains unclear.

The National Resistance Front of Afghanistan, which groups opposition forces loyal to local leader Ahmad Massoud, has pledged to continue opposing the Taliban even after the fall of Panjshir's provincial capital Bazarak.

The UN rights office on Friday said that the Taliban response to peaceful marches in Afghanistan has been increasingly violent, with authorities using live ammunition, batons and whips and causing the deaths of at least four protesters.

Protests and demonstrations, often led by women, pose a challenge to the new Islamist Taliban government as it seeks to consolidate control after seizing the capital Kabul nearly a month ago.

“We have seen a reaction from the Taliban which has unfortunately been severe,” Ravina Shamdasani, UN rights spokesperson, told a briefing in Geneva, saying the United Nations had documented four protester deaths from gunfire.

However, she said that some or all may have resulted from efforts to disperse protesters with firing.

She added that the United Nations had also received reports of house-to-house searches for those who participated in the protests. Journalists covering the protests have also been intimidated.

“In one case, one journalist was reported to have been told, as he was being kicked in the head, `You are lucky you haven't been beheaded,'” Shamdasani said. “Really there has been lots of intimidation of journalists simply trying to do their job.”

Her comments added to the increasingly bleak picture of Taliban rule in the weeks since the Islamist militant group took power.