Afghans protest over alleged rape-murder of teenager by Taliban

Kabul, Apr 6 (efe-epa).- Residents of several districts of northern Afghanistan held protests on Tuesday over the alleged abduction of a teenager by the Taliban along with her parents and the subsequent gang-rape and murder of the girl.

The 16-year-old was kidnapped two months ago in an area controlled by the Taliban in the Darzab district in the Jawzjan province, and was allegedly gang-raped before eventually being killed on Sunday, causing widespread outrage.

“Local residents (of the Darzab and Qushtepa districts) during the protest asked the Taliban to hand over the dead body of the girl to her relatives and to release her parents as well,” an Afghan army spokesperson, Haneef Rezaee, told EFE as the army condemned the crime.

Rezaee claimed that after abducting the girl and her family, “Taliban terrorists gang-raped her and mercilessly martyred her,” calling it another “inhuman crime” in a series committed by the insurgents.

The Taliban has so far not reacted to the allegations.

This is not the first allegation of gang-rape against Taliban fighters.

During the rebels’ occupation of the northern city of Kunduz in 2015, a well-documented case was uncovered by human rights groups such as Amnesty International, in which Taliban “death squads” allegedly carried out mass murder and gang rapes.

The investigators had described a “reign of terror” in the city, in which the Taliban raped women who had relatives in the security forces, or those who provided reproductive health services in the city, apart from others.

They also described how Taliban fighters released all male prisoners of a jail and gave them arms to fight the government, but raped and beat up the women prisoners, and later abducted some of them. EFE-EPA

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