RASC News Agency: Sources among the inmates have informed the media that the Taliban have been beating and torturing a significant number of political prisoners who had gone on a hunger strike to protest the unresolved status of their cases. Media outlets reported on Thursday, May 2, that the Taliban subjected hundreds of Panjshiri and Northern prisoners to brutal and inhumane physical and psychological torture to break their hunger strike.
Sources inside Pul-e-Charkhi prison confirmed to the media that the Taliban transferred 220 inmates to the 40th Directorate of Intelligence and subjected them to a week of torture and beatings. Relatives of these prisoners stated that when they visited Pul-e-Charkhi to see their loved ones, they found most inmates with broken limbs and heads.
Sources added that this event occurred 15 days ago, during which the Taliban did not allow the prisoners’ families to visit them. It is said that these prisoners complain that no human rights monitor or United Nations representative has inspected the condition of prisoners under Taliban control, leaving them in uncertainty and subjected to the group’s calculated torture.
It is noteworthy that neither the Taliban nor the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) has released any details about this incident of inmate torture by the Taliban. The US Department of State, in its annual report on the human rights situation in Afghanistan, stated that 90% of the Taliban’s prisoners are political detainees from non-Afghan/Pashtun ethnicities.
The State Department report noted that last year, the Taliban kept individuals in long-term detention without due legal process and systematically violated their right to legal representation. Previously, several former military personnel died due to horrific torture by the Taliban. In recent instances, a commando commander in Khost province and another former soldier in Parwan province succumbed to injuries sustained from the group’s torture.
