A man convicted of murder was publicly executed at a stadium in eastern Afghanistan, witnesses told AFP on Tuesday, a punishment a UN rights monitor called “inhumane”.The man is the 12th person publicly executed since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, according to an AFP tally.The man, identified as Mangal, was executed in front of a crowd in Khost, the Supreme Court said in a statement.Witnesses told AFP the man was shot three times by a relative of the victim, in a scene witnessed by thousands of people. He had been sentenced to “retaliatory punishment” for killing a man after his case was “examined very precisely and repeatedly”, the court said.”The families of the victims were offered amnesty and peace, but they refused,” it said.These executions could “prove to be positive” because “no one will dare to kill anyone in the future”, said Mujib Rahman Rahmani, a Khost resident at the stadium.Authorities had urged people to attend the execution in official notices shared widely on Monday.They said he was one of several attackers who opened fire on a house in January 2025, killing 10 people, including three women.The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, said Tuesday before the public execution that such acts were “inhumane, cruel, and an unusual punishment, contrary to international law.””They must stop,” he wrote on social media.- International outcry -Public executions were common during the Taliban’s first rule from 1996 to 2001, with most of them carried out in sports stadiums.The previous execution — the 11th according to AFP’s tally — took place in October, when a man was put to death in Badghis in front of thousands of spectators, including Taliban officials.Before that, four men were put to death in three different provinces on the same day in April.Taliban authorities also continue to employ corporal punishment, mainly flogging, for offences including theft, adultery and alcohol consumption.All execution orders are signed by the Taliban’s reclusive supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, who lives in the movement’s heartland of Kandahar.Law and order are central to the Taliban’s ideology, which emerged from the chaos of a civil war following the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989.Rights groups such as Amnesty International have also denounced the Taliban government’s use of corporal and capital punishment.In its annual report published in April, Amnesty said Afghanistan was among the countries where death sentences were imposed after trials that “did not meet international fair trial standards”.

Governments and aid groups in Indonesia and Sri Lanka worked Tuesday to rush aid to hundreds of thousands stranded by deadly flooding that has killed 1,300 people in four countries.Torrential monsoon season deluges paired with two separate tropical cyclones last week dumped heavy rain across Sri Lanka and parts of Indonesia’s Sumatra, southern Thailand and northern Malaysia.Climate change is producing more intense rain events because a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, and warmer oceans can turbocharge storms.AFP analysis of US weather data showed several flood-hit regions across Asia experienced their highest November rainfall totals since 2012.The floodwaters have now largely receded, but the devastation means hundreds of thousands of people are living in shelters and struggling to secure clean water and food.In Indonesia’s Aceh, one of the worst-affected regions, people told AFP that anyone who could afford to was stockpiling.”Road access is mostly cut off in flood-affected areas,” 29-year-old Erna Mardhiah said as she joined a long queue at a petrol station in Banda Aceh.”People are worried about running out of fuel,” she added from the line she had been waiting in for two hours.The pressure has affected prices.”Most things are already sky-high… chillies alone are up to 300,000 rupiah per kilo ($18), so that’s probably why people are panic-buying,” she said.On Monday, Indonesia’s government said it was sending 34,000 tons of rice and 6.8 million litres of cooking oil to the three worst-affected provinces, Aceh, North Sumatra and West Sumatra.”There can be no delays,” Agriculture Minister Andi Amran Sulaiman said.But Alfian, a resident in Banda Aceh, told AFP the government had been “very slow, especially in ensuring basic necessities”.- Food shortage risk -Even areas that were not directly affected were seeing shortages because of blocked transport links.In Dolok Sanggul in North Sumatra, one resident told AFP he had been lining up since Monday afternoon for fuel, and spent the night sleeping in his car.”When we were about to enter the gas station, the fuel ran out,” he said.Aid groups warned that local markets were running out of essential supplies and prices had tripled.”Communities across Aceh are at severe risk of food shortages and hunger if supply lines are not reestablished in the next seven days,” charity group Islamic Relief said.A shipment of 12 tonnes of food from the group aboard an Indonesian navy vessel was due to arrive in Aceh on Tuesday.By Tuesday afternoon, the toll across Sumatra had risen to 712, but the number of missing was also rising, with 500 people still listed.And 1.2 million people have been forced from their homes, the disaster agency added.Survivors have described terrifying waves of water that arrived without warning.In East Aceh, Zamzami said the floodwaters had been “unstoppable, like a tsunami wave”.”We can’t explain how big the water seemed, it was truly extraordinary,” said the 33-year-old, who like many Indonesians goes by one name.The weather system that inundated Indonesia also brought heavy rain to southern Thailand, where at least 176 people were killed.Across the border in Malaysia, two more people were killed.- Colombo floodwaters recede -A separate storm brought heavy rains across all of Sri Lanka, triggering flash floods and deadly landslides that killed at least 410 people.Another 336 remain missing, and an official in the central town of Welimada told local reporters he expected the toll to rise, as his staff dug through the mud looking for victims buried by landslides.President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has declared a state of emergency to deal with what he called the “most challenging natural disaster in our history”.Unlike his Indonesian counterpart, he has called for international aid.Sri Lanka’s air force, backed by counterparts from India and Pakistan, has been evacuating stranded residents and delivering food and other supplies.In the capital Colombo meanwhile, floodwaters were slowly subsiding on Tuesday.The speed with which water rose around the city surprised local residents used to seasonal flooding.”Every year we experience minor floods, but this is something else,” delivery driver Dinusha Sanjaya told AFP.Rains have eased across the country, but landslide alerts remain in force across most of the hardest-hit central region, officials said.burs-sah/lb/fox