The Taliban “massacred” nine Hazara men in south-eastern Afghanistan early last month, Amnesty International has said.
Fighters shot six people dead and tortured another three to death in the village of Mundarakht in Ghazni province, according to eyewitnesses.
“The cold-blooded brutality of these killings is a reminder of the Taliban’s past record, and a horrifying indicator of what Taliban rule may bring,” said Agnés Callamard, Amnesty’s secretary general.
Meanwhile, it has emerged that the Foreign Office did not call an Afghan minister last week regarding the evacuation of local interpreters. The department initially said that foreign secretary Dominic Raab had been “too busy” to make the call, but insisted it had been delegated to a junior minister.
“Given the rapidly changing situation it was not possible to arrange a call before the Afghan government collapsed,” it admitted.
Over in Kabul, the Taliban is reported to have increased its door-to-door searches for former government employees, despite publicly granting them an amnesty. The militant group has been targeting “collaborators”, the RHIPTO Norwegian Centre for Global Analyses said in a report.
