Nine men have been publicly lashed in southern Afghanistan as punishment for different crimes under the country's new rulers, a Taliban-appointed official said.
Haji Zaid, a spokesman for the governor's office in southern Kandahar province, said that the lashings took place at the sports stadium in the city of Kandahar, the provincial capital.
Each man was brutally lashed between 35 and 39 times in front of Taliban officials, religious clerics, elders, and local people, he said.
There has been no information or further details about the crimes the nine people were accused of.
The lashings is the latest example by the Taliban of a huge change in the country's way of life and marks a step in the resumption of the group’s rule with its hardline ideology and interpretation of Islamic Sharia law.
When the Taliban previously ruled the country in the late 1990s, public executions, floggings and stonings were very common.
Fourteen people were publicly lashed in a football stadium in eastern Afghanistan at the end of November, in what was the first time that the Taliban invited Afghans to witness brutal corporal punishment in a sports stadium since the 1990s.
And in December, the Taliban carried out its first public execution since its return to power in Afghanistan last year.
The execution took place in western Farah province in front of hundreds of spectators and many top Taliban officials, according to Zabihullah Mujahid, the top Taliban government spokesman who broke the news on Twitter.
One of two remaining female MPs who stayed in Afghanistan after the Taliban take over was murdered at home on Sunday, according to Afghan police.
Mursal Nabizada, 32, who was an MP in the former US-backed government from 2018 until the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021, had refused to leave Afghanistan despite receiving death threats.
“This country is not a restaurant that I dislike its service and leave it - it’s my land and I will stay beside my people,” she had said in a voice note which was circulated on social media.
Ms Nabizada and her bodyguard were shot dead on the first floor of her Kabul home by several assailants. Her brother and another bodyguard were wounded in the attack.
