KABUL, Afghanistan– Afghan officials hanged six Taliban prisoners Sunday, a resumption of executions in the war that makes good on President Ashraf Ghani’s recent promise to deal harshly with insurgents now that hopes for peace negotiations have evaporated.
The six prisoners were hanged in the morning inside the Pul-i-Charkhi prison – a detention facility on the outskirts of Kabul that is notorious among Afghans as the site of massive executions by the country’s then-communist regime during the 1980s.
Government officials said all of the executed prisoners had been found guilty of crimes against “civilian national security.”
KABUL, Afghanistan – Two buses and a fuel tanker collided Sunday on a major highway in Afghanistan, killing 52 people, officials said.
Another 73 people who had been on the buses were injured in the accident, which set all three vehicles ablaze, said Jawed Salangi, spokesman for the governor of the eastern Ghazni province.
Records show the two buses were carrying a total of 125 passengers, Salangi said. “With 73 survivors out of the 125, 52 people are dead,” he said, adding that the survivors had been transferred to hospitals.
The collision happened at 7 a.m. on the main highway linking the capital, Kabul, to the southern city of Kandahar. Salangi said the road had been cleared and re-opened early afternoon.
Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton said she sees “a great role” for Bernie Sanders and his supporters in a “unified party,” even as she said she welcomed Republicans who are not supporting presumptive nominee Donald Trump.
Days after Trump’s remaining Republican competitors exited the race, the former secretary of state continues to battle for her party’s nomination against the Vermont senator, who has taken several positions to her left on economic issues.
Clinton said she and Sanders have similar views on some issues, including raising the minimum wage and reining “in bad actors on Wall Street and in corporate America.” She said she wants to unify Democrats around those issues.
MEXICO CITY – The northern Mexico prison where authorities suddenly transferred convicted drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman is rated as the worst in the federal penitentiary system for inmate conditions and other factors, according to the government’s own reporting.
A 2015 report by the governmental National Human Rights Commission gave the Juarez prison an overall 6.63 rating on a scale of 0 to 10, the lowest for any of Mexico’s 21 federal prisons. By comparison, the maximum-security Altiplano facility near Mexico City where Guzman was confined before was 10th best with a rating of 7.32.
Altiplano is considered the country’s highest-security prison, and many had thought it to be unescapable. That belief was shattered in July 2015 when Guzman fled the facility through a sophisticated, mile-long tunnel that accomplices dug to the shower in his cell, complete with a motorcycle modified to run on rails laid down in the passage.
Associated Press & Washington Post
