Taliban Execution Video Sparks Outrage

Hillary Clinton: Nation can't prosper 'if half the population is not empowered'
By Neal Colgrass,  Newser Staff
Posted Jul 8, 2012 2:05 PM CDT
Taliban Execution Video Sparks Outrage
A burqa-clad Afghan woman walks in a market in Kabul on July 4, 2012.   (Getty Images)

Afghan officials and human rights campaigners are expressing their outrage over a video of Taliban militants executing a woman for adultery, Sky News reports. The footage, shot last month in Qol village near Kabul, shows a 22-year-old woman in a shawl waiting while a bearded man reads Koran verses about adultery. "We cannot forgive her, God tells us to finish her," he says, before another man shoots her in the back with an AK-47.

Condemnation is coming from all sides. The Afghan government says it "strongly condemns this un-Islamic and inhuman action by those professional killers," and Hillary Clinton, in Tokyo for a world conference, says that "no nation can achieve peace, stability and economic growth if half the population is not empowered." In a Sky News video that shows portions of the killing, Afghan human rights champion Fawzia Koofi says that "we will have to do seriously something about this ... as women, but also as human beings." (More Afghanistan stories.)

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