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Summary The Taliban executed five civilians near Kabul for working with NATO troops, authorities say.
The news on Sunday of the incident in Wardak provinces Jalrez district, 40 kilometres south of Kabul, came a day after the insurgents publicly lashed two Afghan men and just weeks after the public execution of a woman for adultery.In Jalrez, the rebels captured six Afghans returning home from work at a NATO base. The bodies of five of them were found on Sunday, all booby-trapped with explosives, a statement from the provincial governors office said.Their hands were tied behind their backs, a witness told AFP.The sixth man fled his captors, the statement added, blaming the killings on the Taliban, the main insurgent group fighting the Western-backed government of President Hamid Karzai and a 130,000-strong US-led NATO force.The most influential people in SportThe rebels are particularly active across the southern and eastern provinces, and appear to have stepped up efforts to impose their harsh version of Islamic Sharia laws implemented when they were in power between 1996 and 2001.On Saturday, Taliban insurgents whipped two men 40 times in public in a village south of Kabul after accusing them of attempting to kidnap a young boy for ransom.Earlier this month, a video showing the public execution of a 22-year-old woman who was shot in the back in Parwan province just north of Kabul in front of a crowd of cheering men, drew worldwide condemnation.Meanwhile three NATO soldiers were killed in separate attacks in eastern Afghanistan at the weekend, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said.Two died in a roadside bomb explosion early on Sunday and another was killed in an insurgent attack on Saturday, ISAF said, without giving further details or naming the nationalities of the dead.
