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Posted on 11/05/2001 7:09:03 PM PST by JDGreen123

300 Afghans die in ovens

By ANDY WILKS

MURDEROUS Taliban troops baked 300 Afghan civilians to death in steel cargo containers which heated up to 40°C, it was revealed yesterday.

Refugees who fled the carnage also told how limbs were hacked off suspected supporters of the rebel Northern Alliance. And they described how their oppressors tortured defenceless townsfolk. The accounts were given by survivors who managed to escape when their homes were overrun by the Taliban.

They said that around 500 men — watched by their wives and children — had been herded together in Taloqan, northern Afghanistan. The captives were forced into lorries and driven to a makeshift prison camp in nearby Konduz. Then they were split into groups of 20 and put into the containers.

Many were kept locked inside for 4½ MONTHS while their friends and relatives died beside them, one by one. A prisoner who did not give his name said they were allowed only meagre rations of bread and water every three days. Speaking at a refugee camp 20 miles from the frontline, he said: “They pushed me inside a container and I stayed there for 4½ months. “There were about 20 people in each container but there were about 500 people spread in different containers.”

Only 200 of the men survived the searing heat as the sun turned the boxes into 40°C ovens. The bodies of those who died were taken away to be incinerated.

BBC reporter John Sweeney also spoke to an Afghan man called Abdul Batti, 50, whose right leg was shattered by Taliban soldiers. He said he was blindfolded first and laid out on the ground with his hands tied behind his back. Then the troops drove over his leg, crushing every bone and leaving him crippled for life.

Sweeney was also told that 50 men in another small town were captured and beaten on the soles of their feet by the Taliban. One bore grotesque 3in scars across his buttocks where he was thrashed with metal cables. The thumb and first two fingers of his left hand were also chopped off. A local said: “They thought he was a commander. They wanted his guns. They tortured him for information he didn’t have.”

Sweeney spoke to a man who had suffered electric shock torture after he was arrested by the Taliban during the atrocities last year. He told how wires were stretched from a car battery to his leg.

The reporter also visited a family in which one boy had most of his feet blown off by a Taliban mortar attack. Sweeney said: “He is a picture of human misery as the flies crawl around his broken stumps.”

This is sickening it should be told all over the world...

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