Bound and blindfolded, a young couple were shot at close range in southern Afghanistan – for daring to elope.
Abdul Aziz was 21 years old. The girl he ran off with was just 19. Her name, Gul Pecha, means flower.
Officials said the pair were tried by a Taliban court, found guilty of "immoral acts" and sentenced to death. The Taliban denied involvement.
Local administrators say the couple's parents were complicit in their fate. But that has not been confirmed. All that is certain is that yet another swath of Afghan countryside is in the hands of power-brokers whose concept of justice and the rule of law could hardly be further from the ideals that Nato, the international community and the Afghan government claim to support.
Gul and Abdul were both from Lukhi village, in Nimroz province. Their home district borders Helmand, where most of Britain's troops are based.
They were gunned down, together, on Monday. Witnesses said they were shot in front of a local mob by men with AK47 assault rifles.
"They had fled their homes to the neighbouring village, because their parents refused to let them marry," said Nimroz's governor, Ghullam Dastagir Azad. "Their parents tracked them down and handed them over to the Taliban."
Some officials claimed the couple hoped to flee across the border, to Iran. The provincial police chief, Jabar Pardeli, said they were held prisoner for four days in Lukhi, once their parents dragged them back, while a council of clerics argued about their fate in the local mosque.
Once their case was settled, execution was swift and visible. Senior human rights workers said the trial suggested the presence of a Taliban shadow government. "That area is totally under the control of the Taliban," said Zaghrulla Baluch, a tribal elder from the province.
Qari Yousef Ahmadi, a Taliban spokesman, insisted the insurgents were not involved. "I have spoken to the Taliban in Nimroz and they said it was not them," he said.
The district, Khash Rod, borders Washir and Nad Ali, in Helmand, where British troops and American special forces have launched a series of attacks against insurgent strongholds. But Nimroz is largely untouched by international or Afghan troops. Mr Pardeli, the police chief, admitted Lukhi is beyond the reach of his men. It sits on a key smuggling route which links Helmand with Iran.
When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, from 1996 to 2001, they were infamous for the brutal and public way they implemented sharia, or Islamic law. Public executions were commonplace. But in many parts of the countryside, even those outside Taliban control, conservative moral codes condone and encourage similar punishments.
Only last month Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai faced a barrage of international criticism for signing into law religious legislation which the United Nations claimed legalised rape. Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, a student journalist whose plight was taken up by The Independent, was sentenced to death in a provincial court in 2007 for downloading an article off the internet which questioned Islam's treatment of women.
On the rare occasions that women report rapes, they are usually jailed for admitting sex with a man who is not their husband.
A United Nations report on violence against women, published last year, cited cases where a woman who fled her home was raped by the police when she was arrested, while another woman was forcibly returned to an abusive husband. "It's almost impossible to know the real scale of incidents like this," said a senior human rights worker. "Very often these cases are brushed under the carpet or handled inside the family."
may they die the way they lived
. I don't agree with quite how they decided on their targets but i fully agree with what the saints did to them in the movie 
