Fundamentalist Afghan Rebels Reported Hanged

Several fundamentalist Afghan guerrilla leaders were hanged at a public gathering inside Afghanistan for murdering about 30 moderate moujahedeen rebels last summer, a spokesman for the Jamaat-i-Islami guerrilla group said Sunday.

Fundamentalist Hizb-i-Islami commander Syed Jamal Agha was hanged along with several other of the group’s commanders in Taloqan on Dec. 23, Jamaat-i-Islami spokesman Umar Sherdil said, confirming reports published Sunday in local newspapers.

Sherdil told journalists that Agha and a “few” other Hizb-i-Islami commanders were publicly hanged in the city’s main park in the presence of 43 leading elders from northern Afghanistan. He said that a large number of people witnessed the execution.

The executions are the latest in a series of assassinations among moujahedeen guerrillas and politicians in Afghanistan and in refugee camps in Pakistan as Muslim fundamentalists struggle with moderates for control over the 5 million Afghan refugees and the rebel movement.

A Jamaat-i-Islami member who claimed to have witnessed the executions said Agha was questioned in the park and accused by many people present of having killed their relatives and friends.

The commander reportedly told them that he had killed hundreds of people in the fighting against Soviet and Soviet-backed Afghanistan government forces and couldn’t identify them.

He was also reported to have confessed his role in the murders of about 30 Jamaat-i-Islami commanders and moujahedeen in an ambush last summer.

Hizb-i-Islami is a hard-line fundamentalist Afghan guerrilla group seeking to create an Islamic state in Kabul. Jamaat-i-Islami, while also strongly Islamic, is more moderate.

Hizb-i-Islami has been particularly envious of the charismatic and successful Jamaat-i-Islami commander, Ahmed Shah Masoud, who was reportedly the target of the massacre.