Woman, Daughter Stoned to Death in Afghanistan

A woman and her daughter were stoned to death in Afghanistan's Ghazni province on Thursday and officials are blaming the Taliban for the gruesome act, according to BBC News.

Officials said Taliban accused the widow and her daughter of moral deviation and adultery. The police have arrested two suspects.

Security officials said armed men entered the house where the young widow lived with her daughter and took them out to the yard, where they were initially stoned and then shot dead.

Stoning an individual to death is a cruel Islamic punishment given to people who indulge in extramarital sex. The punishment is still carried out in countries like Iran and Taliban-ruled parts of Afghanistan.

The victim's hands are tied behind their backs and the bodies are then covered with a cloth sack. The sack is then buried, with only the victim's head showing above ground; if the victim is a woman, then she is buried only up to her shoulders.

After the person has been secured in the hole, people start chanting Allah hu Akbar and throw palm-sized stones at the head of the victim from a certain distance. The stones are thrown till the person dies or until he/she escapes from the hole.

The horrific incident involving the mother and the daughter happened in the Khawaja Hakim area of Ghazni, one of the 34 provinces of Afghanistan. There has been, according to the BBC report, an increase in violence in recent days, following the Taliban assuming control over significant portions of the Ghazni province. In October 2010, the Taliban killed a woman in Ghazni, accusing her of murdering her mother-in-law.

Ghazni lies on the Kabul-Kandahar road and has always been an important trade center between these two major cities.