 AN Afghan court sentenced a man to death today for the 2001 killing of an Australian and two other foreign journalists and an Afghan colleague — pulled from their cars and shot as they rushed to cover the collapse of the Taliban. The four were Tasmanian television cameraman Harry Burton and Afghan photographer Azizullah Haidari of the Reuters news agency, Maria Grazia Cutuli of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera and Julio Fuentes of the Spanish daily El Mundo. A three-judge panel also convicted Reza Khan of raping one of the victims before she died and of killing his own wife with a single shot from a pistol. "You are sentenced to death," presiding Judge Abdul Baset Bakhtyari told Afghanistan's Primary National Security Court after a brief hearing this morning.
"Bailiff! Stretch his neck!"
"What length, yer honor?"
"Three feet!" |
The journalists were in a convoy from the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad when a group of armed men stopped them on November 19, 2001 — six days after the hardline Taliban militia abandoned Kabul after heavy US bombing. It was unclear if Khan would use his right to appeal the death sentence for the killings and the separate 15 year jail term for committing "adultery by force" with Cutuli. Italian diplomats in the courtroom to observe the trial declined to comment on the verdict.
| "Three feet? 'Atsa not long enough!" |
Khan had admitted shooting one of the foreigners — it was unclear which — and raping Cutuli in a confession broadcast on Afghan state television in August. Appearing in the chilly courtroom on Wednesday wearing a woollen cap and a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, Khan admitted his role in the killings. But he denied the rape charge, and said he and other members of the gang had been following the orders of a local militia commander. "We had to do what he told us," he said, pleading in vain to the judges not to hold him responsible. "I'm just a poor man ... I am not a killer."
| "A rapist, yes. A trigger-puller, yes..." |
He stared intently but without emotion at the judge as he read out the verdict before a policeman led him back to a jail in the government compound which also encloses the court. |